money feeds my music machine (13. 140)

Though the success of the single was unmatched by the short-lived Lemon Pipers, the song topping the Billboard charts on this day in 1968, the band could not be fairly classified as merely a one-hit wonder as “Green Tambourine” is regarded as the breakthrough song for bubblegum pop and psychedelia, exposing the listening public to both seemingly disparate genres in one track. Cowritten by Shelley Pinz, a writer and lyricist working at the Brill Building in Manhattan’s historic Tin Pan Alley neighbourhood—housing offices of industry executives and studios, producing the American songbook of influential and popular music from the Big Band era through the 1970s with the address bestowing a signature sound—the words were inspired by a busker Pinz saw on the street one day and wrote a verse wondering what happened to him. Arranged for tambourine and electric sitar, it introduces the dechronicisation elements of time signature changes, fades and tape echo that no one was certain would be received well in a mainstream release. The Lemon Pipers had some moderate follow up success with “Jelly Jungle,” “Rice is Nice” and “Blueberry Blue”—also by Pinz but did not like working for a label after they were discovered feeling stereotyped and only allowed to record what was intended to capitalise on their initial hit and disbanded in 1969. Outside of US markets, more radio play was given to a cover version that appeared on the eponymous debut album Picturesque Matchstickable Messages from the Status Quo.

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synchronoptica

one year ago: the acting FBI director (with synchronopticæ) plus assorted links worth the revisit

twelve years ago: cross-border pizza deliveries 

thirteen years ago: Shakespearian words 

fourteen years ago: tensions in the Middle East 

fifteen years ago: the Twitter revolutions 

sixteen years ago: US military embraces social media 

seventeen years ago: chain-of-command 

ada violation (13. 139)

Not impacting the US general public and only a cadre of government workers left on the payroll, the partial government shutdown which began on midnight Friday is being characterised by many agencies as a “soft-lapse” and absent guidance or flagrantly ignoring the Anti-Deficiency Act, enacted by congress to prevent incurring obligations and or making commitments in excess of appropriated funds codified by congress during the reconstruction era following the US civil war to attempt to counter coercive over-budgeting encouraged by the executive branch to deplete fiscal expenditures prior to being replenished, this disdain—on Groundhog Day—of the regular ritual of furlough, exceptions and exemptions is yet (regardless if it lasted a weekend or weeks or tardy over time-zones) another sign that the Trump administration is shrugging of norms and statute. Guidance has not trickled down the hierarchy for many and are instructed to conduct business as usual until further notice, considering that many were written up for such transgressions during the last one, incurring more debt without backing and causing conflict in the casual chaos.

hohlerde (13. 138)

Though having a passing familiarity with the esoteric side of the Third Reich, we’re admittedly not tuned into the latest emergent tropes of internet youth culture and were blissfully unaware (here’s a slightly more wholesome alternative in Classical Memes for Hellenistic teens) that there has been a revival of late of Heinrich Himmler’s and other occultists’ preoccupation with Aryan exceptionalism and privileging their ancestry (see also) as semi-divine and separate from others with the lost civilisation called Agartha.  This supposed subterranean realm in the hollow Earth is not seeped in tradition,but rather a new invention by a French fiction writer and colonial officer invented more than a century-and-a-half ago, articulated over several iterations from the original fantasy as a land of advanced races borrowing elements of Atlantis and Lemuria to practitioners of Theosophy believing it to be the domain of the ascendant masters to an Aryan mainstay and propaganda. Typical memes deal with Ancient Alien tropes and feature celebrities and though leaders coded as Nordic and those sharing, if confronted, will say its all in jest and that anyone pointing out the historical context obliviously can’t take a joke, which is a common tactic, like the various trial balloons to stoke outrage, deflect, gaslight and push tolerance, for Nazi boosterism and the vicious cycle behind it.

isolar – 1976 tour (13. 137)

Beginning on this day in 1976 at the venue of Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum to promote his Station to Station album (see previously), the series of concerts given by David Bowie were more commonly referred to as the Thin White Duke tour. The spectacle began without interlude with a screening of the Surrealist short film Un Chien Andalou with the artist appearing on an empty stage immediately following its conclusion, jarring the disoriented audience. Whilst some audio samples were rebroadcast by the King Biscuit Radio network, the only complete recorded footage is courtesy of a bootleg edition captured by a concert goer at the end of the month during a show in Cleveland, since remastered and reissued as the definitive experience, the set list including the tracks “Fame,” “Queen Bitch,” “Life on Mars,” “Changes” and “Diamond Dogs”—with encores of “Rebel Rebel” and “The Jean Genie.” Regarding the tour’s name, some speculate it is an anagram of one of Bowie’s favourite words sailor, or alternatively, in his own words: “Isola is Italian for island. Isolation plus solar equals Isolar—if I remember correctly, I was stoned.” The last shows were a two-night (the scheduled third one was cancelled) performance in mid-May at the Pavillon de Paris.

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 synchronoptica 

one year ago:the first Sears department store (with synchronopticæ) plus the hamster test

 

twelve years ago: polar week, wedding photography from Russia, vegetarian pastizio plus RIP Maximilian Schell

 

thirteen years ago: leveraged yield, Germany’s federal statistics office, Grand Central’s centenary plus twenty years ago today

 

fourteen years ago: managing gossip and misinformation 

 

fifteen years ago: more on the revolution in Egypt 

 

sixteen years ago: space shuttle programme ends 

 

seventeen years ago: Groundhog Day origins 

das kunstwerk im zeitalter seiner technischen reproduzierbarkeit (13. 136)

Courtesy of Damn Interesting, we are directed toward the seminal 1935 essay by pioneering media theorist, cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin—one of the many exemplars of the oppression and rejection of German-Jewish intellectuals under the Third Reich, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Informing later studies by Marshall McLuhan and Susan Sontag, Benjamin wrote of the limitless nature of publishing and distribution to have an estranging effect on the authentic experience of art, though while democratising access and stripping the ritual from production, the assembly line nature direction of publishing houses and film studios, exhibition of artefacts lessens the spectators’ identification with what’s being witnessed. Benjamin nonetheless aspired to write radio dramas and adored movie stars like Catherine Hepburn. This commodification of author and artist, however, is not veneration of the aesthetic value but rather the politicisation of it that affords the chance for all to be critics and creators, the potential for expression but not the right to it, since the gatekeepers are not talent or excellence by rather monied interest of the industry—or it the case of authoritarian regimes, the state itself as a tool of maintaining the status quo. Contemporarily and retroactively, the paralipomena—that is, things and topics omitted from the critical edition of his essay, like the prevalence of photography or as applied to television and social media, influencers and the spectacle of tribalism (see previously) make Benjamin’s observations very relevant, particularly for the performative gratification seeking to redeem what’s been lost to distraction and desensitisation.  Often misquoted from another collection of essays, Theses on the Philosophy of History, as having said, “History is written by the victors,” more nuanced, Benjamin posits that  “incumbents are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.”

dérive (13. 135)

Via {feuilleton} we are directed towards this essay by Hari Kunzru whose recent rather disenchanting drift through London gave him pause to reflect on the Situationists and their manifesto of psychogeography and how, under a permanent curfew, not just by law enforcement but also by consumerism and spectacle, were a boxed in by the geometry of our built environments—a situation that the peripatetics of sixty years ago could have imagined and warned us about that makes the spirit of wandering and discovery near impossible in our unconscionable architecture of choice. Albeit while such a lament may be overdue for us idle flâneurs and has been sometime in the making with algorithmic and optimised nudges not allowing us to stray from the well-trodden path, it’s still worthwhile to consider what sort of blinders our routines and deviations are heir to.

uncanny gulch (13. 134)

For the reminder and textbook example of what the uncanny valley is when the feeling seems a vanishingly premium these days despite a slightly off-putting edge—via Everlasting Blört, we appreciated this photo essay revisiting an abandoned Old West-themed village in Japan. The roadside attraction grew out of modest ensemble known as the Kinugawa Family Ranch (ウエスタン村, in Tochigi prefecture near Tokyo) in 1973 and eventually hosted a population of animatronic denizens (see also here and here) but changing times and fortunes meant its eventual closure in 2006 with the installation ravaged by neglect and vandalism. Abandonment has of course dialled up the creepiness factor, making it look lie the set of a horror movie, and the remaining relics and ruins seem to be an apt commentary on the state of America and the desire to be a lawless cowboy.

synchronptica

one year ago: more Japanese family crests (with sychronopticæ), the founding of DOGE plus a particular kind of gluttony

twelve years ago: little apples of death, no photos of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel plus Cosmos reprised

thirteen years ago: illustrating the internet plus a sci-fi Groundhog Day

fourteen years ago: more thoughts on Groundhog Day 

fifteen years ago: uprising in Egypt plus cobbling together a movement without social media

sixteen years ago: Iran against the world 

8x8 (13. 133)

i’m blue jeans and apple pie and the indian removal act: America reminds its citizens that it is still their country 

heated rivalry: Don DeLillo’s contribution to the erotic sports genre with the pseudonymous novel Amazons—via MetaFilter   

thermoradiative diode: reverse solar panels harness infrared energy at nighttime  

your money’s no good here: photos of ICE with their backs turned posing with detainees (Minnesota rioters) is sending the opposite message 

once upon a prime time: a 1966 Canadian parody about a housewife who loses her family to television and then sees her home invaded by TV tropes  

mirror, mirror: our brains interpret a left to right reversal in our reflections when its really back to front hézmənd-halsh: more unexpectedly effortful British family names—see previously   

another country: Adam Shatz writing for the London Review of Books on the sublime abomination—via Web Curios