order of the friars of st francis of wycombe (13. 682)

Reopened and touted as a family friendly tourist attraction, the Hellfire Caves outside the village of West Wycombe are a a series of artificial caverns excavated at the behest of Francis Dashwood, the 11. Baron le Despencer (the second Post-Master General) in the mid 1700s as a meeting location for its membership of the exclusive, eponymous club for high society rakes, whose rolls included portrait artist William Hogarth (whom painted many fellow members but did not, as far as is known, document any of their activities) John Montagu, 4. Earl of Sandwich, satirist Paul Whitehead and American statesman Benjamin Franklin. Though difficult to ascertain the truth behind rumours of devil worship and orgies, it does seem that debauchery shielded from public inspection or judgement took place underground, and from the statuary in the chalk alcoves, suggests a strong element of pagan rituals, Hercules and the Nemean Lion, Bacchus and Venus also featured prominently. Locals generally respected their privacy for their lord’s munificence and the project having employed many during a time of poor harveststhe crated away material used also for road construction. Dashwood adopted for the group’s motto Fais ce que tu voudras—the mission statement associated with the fictional abbey of Thélème of Rabelais, later taken up by Aleister Crowley as “Do what thou wilt.” Just a short excursion from the capital, there are hand-hewn galleries named after associates Sandwich and Franklin and the Inner Temple with more details and a guided tour from Londonist’s Matt Brown at the link up top.

synchronoptica

one year ago: consoling the condemned (with synchronoptica), assorted links worth revisiting plus new standards from the US federal communications commission

two years ago: eye-chat with a stranger,  a pommel horse champion plus an anagram generator

three years ago: American Graffiti (1973) plus back-links and crediting sources

four years ago: more links to enjoy, the Feast of the Myrrhbearers plus a banger from Tears for Fears

five years ago: your daily demon, Dead Man’s Hand, the impetus for the Manhattan Project plus even more links

six years ago: the Lioness of Bretagne, the Blessed Basil of Moscow plus political malapropisms

day one-hundred forty-nine (13. 681)

The EU is to host an emergency meeting of interior ministers over migrants massing at the north African frontier of Spain at Ceuta.  As the illegal joint Israeli-US war on Iran continues to spiral out of control with its expansion into Saudi Arabia and Iraq, Trump announces that he has decided to “hold off” on further attacks, with the “perimeters of a deal” agreed upon by Tehran—adding that Tel Aviv was joining the US in committing to giving negotiations time to work.Condemned as rank corruption and a tool of market-manipulation, Trump is trying to sell a premium membership plan to his social network that offers the top tier early access to his missive so they can buy and sell stocks accordingly.  An exchange with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly persuades Trump to cancel operations. Dialogue, of which there is only scant evidence from Pakistani and Emirati envoys other than Trump’s vacillating threats, only concerns reopening the Strait of Hormuz to avoid a global economic recession over the energy crisis.

la mise en garde (13. 680)

Whilst not given the deserved retrospective treatment as her near namesake and contemporary Leonora Carrington, in her own time Argentine-Italian surrealist (though rejecting the label the label and broader movement personally), designer, illustrator, dresser and author, especially celebrated for her empowering and erotic portrayals of women (herself included), Leonor Fini, had her share of attention from documentarians wanting to know more about her life, influences and works. We appreciated this entree to Fini via the discovery of some of these films, rarely screened or available online, with subtitles, including the feature length profile by Belgian director and screenwriter Chris Vermorcken and the short produced for Swiss broadcaster Radiodiffusion-télévison-française by journalist Yvan Butler, decades after her credentials were established with showings in her native Trieste, Milan, patronised and exhibited by Peggy Guggenheim as well as costuming several theatrical and screen productions. From 1953 onward, Fini held an open polyamorous relationship with Count Stanislao Lepri, Italian consul general to Monaco, and Polish writer Konstanty Jeleński, remaining inseparable for the rest of their lives along with her retinue of no fewer than twenty-three Persian cats. Like Carrington’s, Fini’s art often focused on liminal beings, witches, werewolves and sphinxes.  More from { feuilleton } at the link above. 

not for all the tea in china (13. 679)

Whilst some are uncommon lexical fossils, some three dozen Chinese terms for teas have been formally made part of the English corpus, language of course reflecting discernment revealing historic attitudes ranging from admiration, appropriation to derision. Bohea and Keemun have been borrowed directly from their regional provenance as well as descriptive words for different styles like oolong (烏龍) and congou, and souchong developed and cultivated in the Wuyi mountains of northern Fujian—green, white, black all coming from the same tea leaves, just dried and cured with different processes which affect the taste. The etymologies of some terms are more abstract, such as “pekoe” for grading leaves, with the Western tea trade’s standards—ostensibly from a word meaning downy and referring the quality of a leaf freshly emerged for the bud and suitable for the highest quality brew—it may have been invented by nineteenth century magnate Sir Thomas Lipton with his premium “orange pekoe” (something that did not exist in Chinese tea culture) in deference to the House of Orange-Nassau and the more established Dutch East India Company who first introduced the beverage to Europe, and then there’s the unfortunate pantomime stock character Widow Twankey. A corruption of the tea export hub of the district of Tuxni (屯溪) in Anhui province that had an unfair reputation of producing lower quality tea leaves, older, courser, raggedy and became associated with something past its prime with a stereotyped staple role in musical stage comedies that would make Mickey Rooney’s part in Breakfast at Tiffany’s seem mild in comparison, an eccentric matronly figure, usually played by a male actor in drag, running a Chinese laundry. One would like to report such depictions did not linger but the 1861 routine lasted through the vaudeville era in the 1930s and the Widow Twankey was revived in the third season of Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules: The Legendary Journeys as a recurring character—played by Michael Hurst—Iolaus, Hercules’ charioteer in that series as well as on Xena: Warrior Princess, in drag and conflating several mythological tradition as the original was Aladdin’s mother somehow. Fortunately other tea-terminology, not the reserve of experts and connoisseurs, is transmitted accurately and with respect though the business of trade was anything but.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Helsinki Accords (with synchronoptica), more synthetic geology plus the playfulness of AI

two years ago: Ford is prepped for his new role,  the samplers of Lorina Buwler plus cartographic innovations

three years ago: Dune published (1965), assorted links worth revisiting plus the case against Trump

four years ago: a taxonomical exploration plus MST3K on Hercules Unchained

five years ago: the debut of MTV (1981), more on hyperinflation, the biblically nameless, more Universal Everything plus a prime pollinator

six years ago: Lammas Day, Deadmau5 and the Neptunes plus facial masks inspired by mass-transit upholstery patterns

day one-hundred forty-eight (13. 678)

Kyiv is pummelled by Russia raids as Ukraine awaits promised permission from the US to produce their own Patriot air defence batteries, America expressing some reluctance now over releasing the licenses. As rhetoric intensifies, both Washington and Tehran threaten to attack vital infrastructure in gulf nations hosting America bases, oil fields, refineries and commercial assets and bridges, highways and power plants in the Islamic Republic, the latter in Trump’s sites speaking during a cabinet meeting called at Camp David, the US president whilst admitting Iran did have a few missiles left, was militarily defeated: “All you can do is keep winning, and the eventually something will happen.” Houthi rebels deny accusations that they plan to place tolls on passage to the Red Sea, insisting that the Bab el-Mandab strait will remain free. The Revolutionary Guard disables more tankers attempting to cross the Hormuz as US naval forces hold the blockade on Iranian ports. Fifty thousand migrants in the span of twenty four hours attempt to enter the exclave of Ceuta through Morocco as the EU moves to suspend member Spain from the Schengen free-movement zone to control immigration.

latent diffusion (13. 677)

Via Web Curios, we are directed towards this excellent dissertation by Kevin Kelly (KK＊) that without recourse to analogy provides one of the most satisfying account—but not explanation since what’s going on under the hood is a mystery to its architects—of how large language models arrange information and build connections through the lens of the latent space—my metaphor, the synapses between neurones—as a potential new medium for artistic exploration. Conceived originally for translation only, the three terminological components of LLMs have semantic meanings behind them: large for containing all the knowledge of Wikipedia and whatever else can be gleaned digitally, language refers to the intent for automatic interpretation drawing on the sum of human writing and applying autocomplete rather than teaching the neural network grammar and the rules of individual tongues to synthesise and imitate and model for the compression routines that for efficiency marshalled concepts in vectors to contain all this statistical data of the next word locally, in the laboratory or on one’s own phone without the need to venture online for what’s on the tip of the tongue—a new kind of abstraction, mindfulness in the billions of rays shooting off in all directions. Researchers were shocked that not only did their experiment yield passable translations without being pre-programmed with the linguistic structure but without containing copies of the collected works of Shakespeare (only the metadata) could render their response in the form of a sonnet and could indeed compose an “original” work in the style of the Bard. Everything, all at once intersects eventually mapped out with an address a multitude of coordinates long. Maybe PfRC has been scraped but only in the sense that it’s not really plagiarised but only adding to an increasingly long, long register of relative whereabouts). Some in the industry maintain that for the model to make new connections and new insights requires data-centres, countless circuits working in concert—something not every one agrees on, with diminishing returns like prospecting for bitcoins, and push for open-source scalability—especially when no one knows where the spark, insight (if it can even be called that) comes from. The artistry enters in the triangulation, stream of conscious style, in that liminal space where the AI shows its work (in theory at least and can be conduced to) and can be dialled up along any lines of reasoning, more poetic, more understandable, coherent, etc without broaching the question of understanding.

present /&/ correct (13. 676)

Having been a long-time fan and standard go-to resource for vintage stationary, brochures and advertising ephemera, we quite enjoyed this interview with Bloomsbury shop and blog co-founder Neal Whittington on the occasion of their entrance into the world of publishing and share some stories about their finds over the years—sometimes ambitions become deadstock but never surplus to needs. The history of the venture and the curated collections is inspired. Much more from It’s Nice That at the link above. Do explore their sundries.

7x7 (13. 675)

giant’s causeway: Curiosity rover discovers valley of honeycomb polygonal rock formations—see also  

ars notoria: a magical medieval text that promised a pathway to instant, universal mastery of the liberal arts 

singing seat: artist Dan Ortiz Leizman transforms Monobloc chairs into stringed instruments 

translator of original ‘minions’ epic poem slams sexless, bloodless film adaptation: most fun movie discourse since Barbenheimer—see more, see also here and here—via Kottke   

it’s giving: a glossary of Gen Z lexical constructs  

mittingsaia: a mysterious illustrated Swiss manuscript from the 1940s in the style of a European travel brochures with undecipherable captions that resemble AI hallucinations  

van allen belt: despite its small size, no bigger than North America, Mercury’s weak magnetic field can trap solar winds

synchronoptica

one year ago: Trump administration obliterates Clean Air Act plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: obligatory voting in Australia (1924), the Likert scale plus more on millenialism

three years ago: more links to enjoy 

four years ago: a banger from Annie Lennox, even more links, more antique abecedaria plus graphic designers Elinor and Joe Selame

five years ago: time crystals, photographer Lora Webb Nichols, Olympic mottoes, assorted links worth the revisit, a world music radio station plus a David Bowie inspired costume

six years ago: more links to enjoy, a Chinese mission to Mars plus an interim emoji release