1q or the feast of the archangels

Venerating Saint Michael and companions, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel in honour of their victory of Lucifer and the rebel angels in the angelomachy, Michaelmas (previously) is observed on the penultimate day of September—in some traditions, the feast extending into the next day—and has also come to one of the four quarter dates of the financial year, kept since at least medieval times to mark when school and court terms were to commence and the accounting was due to ensure that debts and unresolved cases didn’t linger (see also) into the next season.

Though the customary hiring fairs and local elections do not necessarily adhere (the tradition is retained for the election of London’s lord mayor, just as peasants during the Middle Ages would appoint a reeve from among their peers to represent their interests to the manor) to the same calendars, this time of year—still referred to as the Michaelmas term for matriculating students in England, Scotland and Ireland and for the US Supreme Court’s and the English bar’s Inns of the Court’s fall sessions and of course it marks the end and beginning of the fiscal year for budget purposes. Asters or the Michaelmas daisy are one of the few flowering plants left at the beginning of autumn, and thus inspiring the rhyme and invocation: “Michaelmas daisies among dead weeds, bloom for Saint Michael’s valorous deeds.”

king of rods

Brilliantly a clever graphic designer and Trek fan took advantage of the correspondence between the classic Thoth tarot deck used for divination—the twenty-two card Major Arcana (Greater Secrets) plus the fifty-six suite Minor Arcana (Lesser Secrets) –and the seventy-eight episodes of the Original Series creating a custom deck with a fortune-revealing homage to some of the franchise’s most memorable, founding characters. What’s in the stars for you? Much more to explore at the links above.

$750

Whilst specifically reporting that Trump’s tax-filings did not reveal any insights into previously unknown connections to Russia, the leaked documents to the New York Times do reveal how broken the US tax code is in allowing the wealthy and powerful to engage in tax avoidance and the industry that that activity has created plus perhaps most importantly that the fake billionaire and impeached phoney president has hundreds of millions of loans coming due in the coming years—what could potentially be during his second-term in the White House.

Much of this credit was extended to Trump by a particular bursar at Deutsche Bank (see previously here and here). Sadly even if the characterisation of Trump’s desire for re-election as an unpleasantry to be stomached for the sake of turning country into a theocracy that upholds the status quo and undermines any real or perceived threat to it is only a cover for Trump to continue his career as grifter-in-chief and support welfare programmes and executive socialism that benefit his himself and his cronies with rugged, unforgiving capitalism for the rest is shown to be the sham it’s been all along, it won’t matter to his persecuted throngs of supporters nor change any minds, so long as their demagogue hates and punishes the same people that they have been emboldened to hate and punish.

john paul i

Though only reigning for a brief thirty-three days, dying on this day in 1978 (*1935)—touching off the first year of three popes since 1605, the pontiff with the birth name Albino Luciani was responsible for quite a number of firsts and lasts. No pope before him had been born in the twentieth century and his passing marked the end of a series of Italian-born popes that extended back to Clement VII’s election in 1523.

Refusing a coronation, John Paul was the first pope to be inaugurated, in an effort to humanise the office, and only accepted the pallium accorded to Rome’s bishop and put to an end the practises of using the sedia gestatoria—the ceremonial throne used for processions and carried on the shoulders of twelve men, replaced later by the popemobile—and referring to himself in the third person, the royal we, though traditionalists in the curia often edited it back into his speeches. The first to take a double-name, in honour of his two immediate predecessors, John Paul was also the first to use the ordinal number Primo. Pope Francis also has a unique papal name but does not use a numeral. Aside from this trivia, the bride-builder also reached out to the Islamic communities of Rome and Venice and helped them secure the right to build mosques. John Paul II of course took the name as success in memory of his short reign and sudden death upon his election by the conclave on 14 October.

ofdon

Trump’s nomination of a handmaiden (see previously) to the US supreme court to fill the vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not complete America’s transformation to a regressive, angry and cultish theocracy but certainly inches it closer, since unfortunately any line of questioning what uploading the law has to do with religious convictions now carries a sacrosanctity that is inviolate under the prevailing hypocrisy and happy talk that dominates political discourse.

A not insignificant portion of the electorate believe that Trump was appointed by God because reasons. Not only is the party gaining an ally that will help throw the election just like in the 2000 outcome of Bush vs Gore when the results are too close to call but will also cement an agent to overturn all the progress towards a more equitable and transparent society made for the past six decades, effectively transforming the USA into that amorphous monolithically purple blob on the map that marked the Soviet Union, only ascribing to the saddest and most decrepit ideology.

panda diplomacy

Via Nag on the Nag’s expertly curated Sunday Links (always a lot to explore here), we are introduced to the latest obsession, research rabbit hole from the contributors of Artsy magazine in this 1861 portrait of a pedigree Pekingese by German transplant painter Friedrich Wilhelm Keyl, who specialised in the subject and received many commissions from the court of Victoria and Albert. Though living a contented to all appearances and happy eleven more years in the lap of luxury, there’s a dark side to little Looty and her role as a political prop—sort of like Nixon’s Checkers speech.

Charmingly called after the diminutive for the spoils of war by the queen, this example of the exclusive companion breed reserved for the Imperial family of China was one of five Pekingese dogs found guarding the corpse of a lady who took her own life in 1860 as an Anglo-French exhibition force advanced on the Old Summer Palace (The Garden of Perfect Brightness and royal residence) and under the orders of Lord Elgin in retribution for an earlier failed peace treaty began to ransack the place at the height of the Second Opium War. The plunder and destruction took a force of four thousand men three days to carry out, owing to the palace’s monumental size. The sentimental portrait takes on new meaning when looking at it through the fraught historical context of colonialism and is still a matter that the European powers are coming to terms with. Not to be outdone by his father that stole the Marbles, Elgin’s (who also served as governors of Jamaica, Canada and India) wanton act forced the capitulation of the Qing Emperor and ceded the rest of the Kowloon Peninsula to the crown colony of Hong Kong. Posing before a Ming vase that was surely also part of the pilfered treasure, you can detect a hint of saudade and longing her eyes. We’d like to give back Looty her old name as well.

art povera

Presented to the public on this day in 1967 with an exhibition—Im Spazio—opening in Genoa and showcasing the works of seven Italian, described by art critic and curator Germano Celant as impoverished art, the movement often deploys found objects, the ephemeral and everyday and imbues them with meaning by revealing the lost intersectionality of nature and industry.
Due to the nature of the media (not cheap or perishable materials necessarily but rather an intentional apposition to the canvas and marble of established art), many of these first works are no longer around and the movement ended in the early 1980s and being no expert I couldn’t say what legacy and successors that the school has but the term does seem useful and fitting for a lot of modern installations.

america is hard to see, kids

Via one of our favourite newsletters, Kottke, we come to discover the extensive and ethnographic photorealistic art of Robert Bechtle (*1932 – †2020) in memoriam with the reports of his recent passing.

Indistinguishable from a candid, house-proud family photograph from a distance, this representative triptych ’61 Pontiac (1968-1969) captures his style and message, life at the pace of point-and-click documentation but fastidiously rendered by brushstrokes. The painterly quality to this deadpan portrayal is unsettling, rattling the viewer until one can appreciate the beauty underlying the freeze-frame of the moment. Almost the entire portfolio of this San Francisco Bay Area painter features cars though human subjects are the exception. Much more to explore at the link above.