forget it, jake—it’s chinatown (13. 536)

As our faithful chronicler informs, the neo-noir classic directed by Roman Polanski and starring Faye Dunaway, Jack Nicohson, John Huston, Diane Ladd and Burt Young was released on this day in 1974 to critical acclaim. Over the milieu of the California water wars, a series of political conflicts over water rights at the turn of the last century with the expansion of Los Angeles and the construction of aqueducts to divert resources from Owens Valley and Mono Lake used by ranchers and farmers, a woman, calling herself Evelyn Mulwray, engages a private detective to keep on whom she says is her husband, a civil engineer with the California public utility department. The investigator photographs the subject with another woman, exposing their apparent affair, but then is confronted by the engineer’s real wife, concluding that the impostor set up her husband in order to discredit him and prevent the discovery of a complex conspiracy to hoard water whilst the city is experiencing a drought. Parallel to Dunaway’s scripted revelation “My sister! My daughter!”—the film could be read as a retelling of Oedipus Rex, a plague exploited to gain power ultimately reflecting the endemic corruption of society, misidentification, and a maimed protagonist who realises the truth too late to affect the outcome—genealogists working for Time magazine informed Nicholson after the making Chinatown that his sister was, in real life, was actually his mother, raised by his grandparents as their own son when the actor was born out of wedlock to showgirl June Frances Nicholson. On learning this fact at age thirty-seven, he acknowledged it was a “pretty dramatic event but it wasn’t what I’d call traumatising…I was pretty well psychologically formed.”

addendum (13. 535)

Underwriter Lloyd’s of London intelligencer branch that tracks maritime shipping data reports that Tehran’s and Muscat’s newly created Persian Gulf Strait Authority are mandating that vessels transiting the Hormuz take out special coverage through government approved providers. This insurance requirement is regarded as a prelude to tolls, which is probably the least worst thing to come out of the stultifyingly bad grand deal of Trump’s— a nominal fee factored into the cost of doing business that would be passed along to the consumer but a tax we think anyone would happily pay in exchange that Trump and his minions don’t embark on more empire-building adventures with the tolerance, forethought and follow-through worse than a package tourist. Despite the ceasefire announced yesterday between Hezbollah and the IDF, strikes continue with dozens more dead in southern Beirut, pressuring Iran to take action and respond to what hardliners are calling a blatant violation of the MOU with Washington unable to reign in Israel, whose minister of national security declared that “all of Lebanon must burn.” Direct negotiations stalled with the US, Pakistani interior minister Mohsin Naqvi returns to Tehran for meetings with high level officials.

day one-hundred eleven (13. 534)

Unveiling the new Air Force One, a used Qatari 747 gifted to the US president, Trump will hold cabinet meetings at Camp David over the weekend (he’ll make the short trip to upper Maryland by Marine One) as peace talks with Tehran scheduled to begin in Switzerland have been postponed, having only gone to the disfavoured official retreat one other time during his second term to discuss ending the war in Gaza. Defending his diplomatic blunder which at best solves some of the problems he started with the war and gives away too much to Iranian, putting the US in a far weaker position, Trump says, “We didn’t negotiate out of desperation—Iran did, they’re done. We’ll go through sixty days. They won’t get any money, not even ten cents.” The paint job ordered for the capitol reflecting pool on the Washington DC ellipse, costing fourteen million dollars, to turn it “American flag blue” for America’s birthday celebration is chipping and algae blooms have turned it toxic green.

synchronoptica 

one year ago: camping opposite Chinon (with synchronoptica) 

two years ago: Ursula K Le Guin’s webpages plus assorted links to revisit

three years ago: the Stars On cover series, promotional marketing for 2001 plus article spinning

four years ago: the Glastonbury festival (1971) plus the formula for streaming series

five years ago: Germany consolidates its capital, wandering lonely as a cloud, the gap in the Watergate tapes, the V2 rocket plus a unique Olympic medal

six years ago: North Korean UNICODE, Cher does West Side Story plus Jaws (1975)

9x9 (13. 533)

biometrics: the after effects of gamification of physical activity—sometimes I want to launch my pedometer and everything else into the Sun 

sovereign wealth fund: Bernie Sanders’ proposal to cede control and profits of AI to the American public  

cinecope: an archive of rare and rarefied films—via Web Curios  

battle of the bit: an authoritative archive of chiptune and MIDI renditions  

otome: the rise of synthetic, choose-your-own-adventure romance  

a privet matter: a farmer hacks down China’s lonely tree—see also here and here  

chromacity: the colours on the spectrum that your screens cannot deliver—via MetaFilter  

a show of hands: designing more finger-friendly haptics for our devices—plus dispelling old myths, via Waxy  

dark flow: how your scrolling addiction was built off casino gambling

disposable memory (13. 532)

Courtesy of Web Curios, we are directed to a global photography project conducted by Matthew Knight between 2008 and 2013 that entailed seeding locations all over the world with a single-use camera, a set of instructions to take a few pictures and pass it on until the film is exhausted and how to return it for developing.
Coinciding with the introduction and adoption of the iPhone and a pre-revolt of sorts of what the pervasive device would do to picture-taking and social media (though there are a lot of selfie and at least one unsolicited dick-pic), these anonymous images from all over—the Geoguessr aspect of it was fun: cameras 160 and 159 seem to be left at the South and North Poles respectively and there’s one roll from Mongolia and another from Austin Texas carry a affecting nostalgia for a time when we were connecting the world, demonstrably so, and online and offline were distinct magisteria.
Only a fifth of the some five hundred cameras were returned (which is a pretty fair response rate and photo quality reflecting the carelessness of a digital camera native in many instances) but we wonder what happened with the rest and if any of these messages in a bottle might yet be answered.

day one-hundred ten (13. 531)

After increasingly deadly clashes in the wake of the US-Iranian truce that threatened to sabotage the peace settlement before talks (postponed with the US vice president delaying his departure to Switzerland, despite proclaiming that the sixty-day period for negotiations had started) could even begin, Hezbollah and the IDF declare a ceasefire. The term made increasingly Orwellian in practise, we will see if it plays out like the ceasefire arrangement in Gaza, the opposite of an armistice that’s seen a thousand Palestinian deaths and the population squeezed into a smaller and smaller area as Israel occupation expands. Ukrainian forces launch a retaliatory drone attack on Moscow, the largest yet during the four year conflict, aim to bring the realities of war to the home-front for the Russian people. Trump, messy drama queen that he is, scripts his own Italian soap-opera, claiming that Giorgia Meloni begged him for a picture together on the sidelines of the G7 summit. The prime minister called out his made up story and cancelled a trip to America scheduled for her foreign minister. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz surges, from a trickle to approaching a quarter of pre-war crossings. The MOU stipulates that Iran will keep the waterway open to all for a thirty-day period in order to clear the backlog of ships stranded, but leaves open the possibility to impose tolls or restrict certain vessels flying under the flag of enemies in the future. Quite a few other significant concessions to Tehran are emerging, amplified by Trump’s attempts to defend his grand deal—claiming without him Israel wouldn’t exist and he saved the world economy from sliding into a depression. The Supreme Leader says the settlement was reached out of desperation and panic in Washington.

you made this? (13. 530)

Knowing it was ongoing project, I was not completely surprised to see references to John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows circulating on the internet but we did not realise that the revival was not due to a reissue or a follow up edition by the author but rather an act of wholesale plagiarism. Whilst nonsensically including the entire text of the book and all his neologisms for universally felt emotions that we don’t have the words to express (not the best marketing strategy to sell a book), the slick impostor website, which includes blurbs and a biography and links to purchase the dictionary, absent were any of the illustrations to accompany the definitions, instead replaced with unpolished AI-generated images and a feature to gin up a new sorrow with the help of GPT-4—which seemed pretty off-brand for the writer and the attempt to limn lacunas of human experience. Every submitted sorrow is a bit rubbish and unneeded with fussy and overcomplicated etymologies and pronunciation guides (see also). Andy Baio of Waxy got in touch with Koenig and tracks down the mystery of this unauthorised “tribute” site. Vibe coded, I suspected that this might have been a case of spontaneous generation but arguably more tragic, malicious and pervasive, the bootleg site siphoning off profits from another’s creativity is a marketing agency feeling entitled. There ought to be a word for this sad state.

i spy with my little eye (13. 529)

The latest from Neal Agarwal (previously), Wiki Spy, invites one to explore nearly forty-thousand images from Wikipedia (see also) as chaotic collages that reshuffle with every visit. Clicking on the picture brings one to the source article, as in off-centre, William Hogarth and his pugnacious pug, Trump, who has his own entry and category in the Commons. Let us know what pops out for you and piques your curiosity.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a visit to Verdun (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: hair shavings as battery components plus more mysterious monoliths 

three years ago: Rocky Horror Picture Show (1973) plus assorted links to revisit 

four years ago: more links to enjoy, Juneteenth, SS Gervasius and Protasius plus designer Lutz Colani

five years ago: rendered realities plus generative textile patterns

six years ago: unclergyable offenses, more dazzle camouflage, Trump censored on social media plus the dance of the queen bee