beckoning cat

My Modern Met gives us an overview of the fascinating history and iconography of the maneki-neko (招き猫), the greeting figurine meant to attract customers and good luck that first became commonplace during the Edo era, typically featured clutching an oval gold coin from that period and the phrase multiplying it ten million times. Traditionally depicted only in white, Feng Shui theory introduced further colours with red invoking protection from illness and blue a charm for success in education. Learn more at the link above.

we go undercover, wait out the sun

Rare and unseen, we are enjoying this preview of a retrospective exhibit of the portrait photographer Masayoshi Sukita going on display at Tokyo’s Blitz Gallery that includes a collection of previously uncirculated pictures of David Bowie, whom the artist first encountered in 1972 to see what all the fuss was about and remaining friends until the singer’s death in 2016. An iconic image (see also) with significantly more exposure, Sukita took the image that became the cover art for Bowie’s 1977 Heroes album. More at Wallpaper at the link up top.

programming block

Admittedly more of a nostalgic indulgence than graphic design inspiration, Regan Ray (previously) brings us a treasury of titles hosted on the original oldies cable network—from the marketing team that produced MTV’s commercial bumpers, that debuted in 1985, replacing A&E (the Arts and Entertainment network) that formerly occupied this nocturnal slot of Nickelodeon. Peruse a gallery of sitcoms that aired on the channel at the link up top. 

 

edge of seventeen

Released on the studio album Bella Donna—the debut solo recording from Stevie Nicks—on this date in 1981, the song also known by its parenthetical refrain “Just Like the White Winged Dove” was prompted as a means to express the grief the artist felt with the death of an uncle and the murder of John Lennon happening at the same time in December 1980. The title came from mishearing an answer from Tom Petty’s first wife about when they met due to her strong accent with opening lyrics coming from a caption in the menu of a restaurant in Arizona: “The white wing dove sings a song that sounds like she’s singing ooh, ooh, ooh. She makes her home here in the Great Saguaro cactus that provides shelter and protection.”

pluralia tantum

Existing only in the plural form, the term bibliobibuli was coined in 1957 by H. L. Mencken from the Latinate roots biblio and bibulous to call the set that read too much: “I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and simulation of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.” This harsh indictment applies it seems to those who with a slate of podcast subscriptions requiring listening to and catching up on. Now I feel personnally attacked.

style #5253

Dubbed the “Christmas Pattern” by factory workers as production demands for the affordable, utilitarian linoleum flooring of textured, interlocking bricks touted as the perfect choice for small kitchens (see also) guaranteed holiday bonuses during the Great Depression when most others were desperate for work, the enduring pattern with an older vintage than one expects with those harvest palettes of a later time owes its decades-spanning success to residential interior designer Hazel Dell Brown, who helped impart personal expression, ingenuity and improvisation with respect to space and budget in her innovative directions that she took the industry re-calibrated to fulfil the needs of a growing middle class. Learn more from 99% Invisible at the link above.

hanna montana

Only identified by name in apoccryphal books of the Bible and Qur’an and generally only identified as the wife of Imran / Joachim, Saint Anne (along with her husband) are venerated on this day in the Catholic Church, though the maternal grandmother of Jesus is revered in many spiritual traditions and is regarded as intercessor and patroness of grandparents, Britany, Canada, Sri Lanka and Detroit, lace makers, second-hand clothes dealers, seamsters, teachers, sterility (due to her miraculous birth of Mary at an advanced age and thought barren) and cabinet-makers.

alternative work site

In a rollicking, wide-ranging look at the precedents for the creator economy in correspondence course—notably of our scribe stenographer Sir Isaac Pitman—and the move that originally tethered us to office space, sourced to in the Uffizi in Florence, where bureaucracy and administration were centralised in 1560 as a cadet branch of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, now a world-class gallery gifted to the city after the Medici line died out.

Afforded the opportunity to work remotely and knowing arguments for compelling staff to return are specious at best—synergy and presence packaged as the benefits we are missing out on away from colleagues I think are the opaque justifications for accountability and the passkeys of those supervisors who like to play house at the office because they’re denied it at home, the informing past is an interesting and advisable lens to re-evaluate custom and workplace culture as crisis and contingency hopefully begin to ebb. Technological advance can be regressive in its demands and requirements to fill the time. Much more to explore and contemplate at Tedium at the link up top.