10x10 (12. 449)

shooting the messager: the AP reporter fired and blacklisted for scooping the story of Nazi Germany’s surrender eight years ago—via Strange Company  

🚏: Shanghai metro lets riders design their own bus routes  

vision cantos: Denis Cooper on filmmaker Jud Yalkut—via { feuilleton }  

grave of the fireflies: Ze Frank (previously) on what’s happening with our bioluminescent friends  

the poyais scam: confidence tricker Gregor MacGregor’s con to lure investors in a fictional central American territory 

that’s why the apostrophe is single and not plural: the story of Anna Jarvis—the creator that later sued for the abolition of Mother’s Day 

flugsteighalle: a digital exhibition of Berlin’s monumental Tempelhof airport—previously—via das Kraftfuttermischwerk  

the madison avenue beat: a selection of vintage advertising jingles presented as a dance remix 

 corner of the city: street photographer Tong Ho Chung Howard’s most famous image captures the traditional tong lau (唐樓) architecture of Hong Kong, gradually being replaced by urban renewal programmes  

root causes: competing narratives for WWII Victory Day celebrations

the war is over (12. 448)

Just following the announcement of the cessation of fighting after the Fall of Saigon by US president Gerald Ford, one hundred thousand spectators gathered in New York’s Central Park for a final rally with congress member Bella Abzug and concert organised by Paul Ochs (previously) with a lineup featuring Pete Seeger, Odetta, Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and others. After a duet with Baez of the ballad “There but for Fortune”, the concert closed his Ochs’ famous protest anthem, overshadowed by but not to be confused with John Lennon’s song with a similar same name, which was inspired in part by poet Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 declaration that the Vietnam war was over and that it could be ended by simply saying so (“if you want it” like the above) and stripping it of legitimacy—Och’s final public performance, though Lady Gaga sang it for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

Angry artists painting angry signs
Use their vision just to blind the blind
Poisoned players of a grisly game
One is guilty and the other gets the point to blame—pardon me if I refrain

With the choral response: I declare the war is over
It’s over, it’s over

Suffering mental health problems exacerbated by heavy drinking that ultimately led to his suicide in April of the following year, friends and family say that Ochs died many deaths, lastly taking on the persona of one John Butler Train, telling people that this impersonator had murdered him and had replaced him—and in 1968, politically with the violence of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in 1972, professionally, after being strangled in Tanzania and deciding he could no longer sing, on 11 September 1973, spiritually, when the government of Chile was overthrown by US involvement and finally mentally with this psychotic break. Ochs’ legacy continues with numerous tributes and cultural references as well as a strong influence on subsequent artists.

*    *    *    *    *

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth the revisit (with synchronoptica) plus the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1927)

seven years ago: Muggertonian star charts, Russian electioneering plus Gaslight (1944)

eight years ago: wood libraries, Trump deflects from ties to Putin, bringing back the Microlino plus mathematical music

ten years ago: the brotagonist of this story, a visit to Hanau plus a visit to the Leipzig Zoo

eleven years ago: rebooting Star Wars plus Kierkegaard’s Either/Or

helle and phrixus (12. 447)

A recently excavated domus of an elite family in Pompeii (previously)—so named above for a fresco in one room depicting a part of the myth of the Golden Fleece—recounts one family’s rather heart-rending attempt to escape from the pyroclastic eruption by barricading themselves in the main hall of the richly appointed residence, events reconstructed from the voids the long since decomposed wooden barrier of a bed litter or the dining sofas of the triclinium, an arrangement for three to eat supper semi-reclined with the fourth space left open for the servants to present various courses—an aristocratic dining format that continued into the Middle Ages, in the volcanic ash and debris.As with an estimated sixteen thousand inhabitants who perished by this disaster, the residents of the so-named Ella and Frisso home did not make it. 

The narrative shown recounts the brother and sister targeted by their wicked stepmother, Ino, daughter of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, who came on the scene thanks to Athamas’—founder of Thessaly—philandering ways that drove away his first wife, a nymph—one of three-thousand daughters of Oceanus and Tethys—called Nephele, cursing the land with a drought as she left. Ino tried to convince Athamas that sacrificing his son was the only way to restore the rains. Intervening, as with the story of Abraham, Nephele presented a winged ram with fleece of gold—sired by Poseidon and her sister Theophane, whom transformed all the other inhabitants into animals during their ovine congress. The siblings escaped over the seas but Helle accidentally fell off over the strait of the Dardanelles, the Hellespont named in her honour whilst her brother was safely conveyed to Colchis (ეგრისი), where Phrixus dutifully sacrificed the ram to the gods, set in the stars as Poseidon’s avatar, as the constellation of Aries. Phrixus hung the pelt in a sacred grove, guarded by a dragon (a detail which always seemed to me like an welcome crossover), which Jason and the Argonauts eventually pilfered, symbolising native knowledge and techniques, sort of like Prometheus giving away secret and sacred intelligence with the gift of fire. The family who commissioned the tragic moment in this allegory could not have known how it would be unearthed two millennia later, surviving one of the best documented and studied tragedies to befall humankind—thus far.

… (12. 446)

At the end of last month, one of the few remaining telegraph stations in China prepared to shut down, thousands traveled to Hangzhou in far eastern Zhejiang province to pay their respects and dispatch last missives (see previously). We enjoyed the shared memories of workers and patrons as told through the story of one individual who undertook a rather epic journey on a slow train east to send his first and last messages. Writing out their notes by hand, character by character, people sent telegrams to themselves, friends and relatives both yet to be born and departed and operators recalled the echoing cadence of the office and specific numerical sequences used to encode words and phrases. The once vital communications network has all but disappeared, although during the last day of operation, the station, which had in recent years only been sending an average of twenty-five a year, processed nearly six-thousand telegrams. Memories are not so far removed as China has had telegraphy technology since the nineteenth century, it remained popular and the only guaranteed method of reaching someone urgently until peaking in the late 1980s when more than forty million messages were sent annually, individual stations handling on average a hundred thousand each.

космос-482 (12. 445)

Launched 31 March 1972, the Soviet Venus probe that failed to escape low Earth orbit is expected to make a crash landing, plunging through the atmosphere today, more than fifty years after the mission was aborted and while debris of this size, five hundred kilograms, deorbits regularly, most space junk of this mass disintegrates before reaching the surface, breaking up into shooting stars—however with a titanium heat shield and built to withstand the rigours of exploring our hot and crushing neighbour, it is likely to survive the journey and land in one piece. While far more likely to hit the ocean, it could smash down on someone’s property (see previously here and here). Shrouded in the secrecy of the Cold War Space Race, it was common practice for the USSR’s space exploration programme to use low Earth orbit as a staging grounds, a sort of parking lot, for missions to other planets, launched well ahead of the ideal path for future rendezvous with their intended targets, and all given the designation of Kosmos so as not to publicise mission goals. A misfire of the booster rockets condemned the vehicle to this decades’ long limbo, retaining the original mission identification, rather than making it the planned Venera 9 atmospheric study.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a collection of abandoned blogs (with synchronoptica) plus the Tea Act of 1773

seven years ago: the FCC complains about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner plus photographer Rodney Lewis Smith

eight years ago: Persian miniatures, Trump fires FBI director James Comey plus artisanal coins

eleven years ago: cracking down on intelligence leaks plus the practise of kintsugi

twelve years ago: plagiarism scandals in German politics

16-bit intel 8088 chip (12. 444)

Whilst there is more perhaps more superficial interoperability in computing today than in years past (see previously), this unlikely but sublime poem by Charles Bukowski, laureate of American lowlife, after receiving a Macintosh and laser printer from his wife for Christmas in 1990 and significantly increasing in already prodigious output in his final years, his experience with lost files and frustrations with manufactured obstacles speak to the same phenomena of walled-gardens, lock-in, portability issues and general enshiffication.

with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer. both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

Whilst not pioneering in his adoption or embrace, Bukowski quickly came to assert that, despite technical difficulties recognised as defective by design, he could not write any other way. More from Kottke at the link above.

chrysopoeia (12. 443)

Although the aims of alchemists of transforming base metals into gold has been previously achieved through synthetic transmutation first in 1941 by heavy bombardment of mercury with neutrons—though the resulting isotopes were extremely radioactive and again in 1980 by Glenn Seaborg at Lawrence Livermore labs by surgically removing protons and neutrons from bismuth atoms, these demonstration projects were prohibitively expensive and would need to be scaled up a trillion-fold in order to produce a microscopic speck of the precious metal. We learn, however—via tmn—that researchers working on the ALICE programme at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the acronym somewhat disappointingly only standing for A Large Ion Collider Experiment designed to study conditions immediately after the Big Bang with by creating exotic plasma phases of matter, have recently detected the mass albeit very short-lived conversion of lead into gold as the extremely hot and close-packed conditions cause dissociative reactions that can cause the target element to eject a small number of protons and neutrons, producing gold (the similar densities probably what inspired the study of alchemy in the first place). The above quick-silver and thallium were also temporary by-products of nuclear transmutation. Related to the title term, χρυσοποιία, ἀργυροποιία (argyropeia) refers to artificial silver-making, usually trying with copper.

ballerina cappuccina (12. 442)

A series of AI-generated memes featuring a cast of surrealist chimeric characters, usually a visual portmanteau of animals with vehicles or fruit with anthropo-morphic features emerged a few months ago and the phenomena is called Italian brainrot (see previously) for the accompanying text-to-speech voiceover in not-quite-nonsense Italian (see also) for rhyming effects to low-effort static images, which nonetheless seemed primed to evoke a feeling of uncanniness. Minted as volatile meme coins, they seem to be employed to underscore aggressively self-aware shitposting as well as the amount of AI slop inundating the internet. The original Tralalero Tralala and Bombardino Crocodilo have been cancelled as Islamophobic but have returned in a more satirical form and all are subject to remix and revision as well as commentary about the impermanence problem of AI image creation when an input is subject to the telephone-game. The trend is also ostensibly in response to mainstream studio entertainment, franchises sorely lacking in originality.  Chimpanzini grappalini

@eliotmediaoficial Todo lo que debes saber de los personajes del brain rot italiano #chismecito #tik_tok #tiktokers #creadores #trends ♬ sonido original - Eliot Store

synchronoptica

one year ago: AI-generated cityscapes (with synchronoptica) plus Swedish PhD traditions

seven years ago: US-Iranian tensions plus US withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal

eight years ago: Belphegor’s Prime, Trump’s interference with the justice system, Banksy’s Brexit mural plus a suitably gilded property

eleven years ago: a hoard of paintings of unknown provenance plus the question of Scottish independence

twelve years ago: Nazi Germany’s capitulation and a fateful date