Crazy watch

I will be trying to gather and concentrate a lot of threads I have been tracking in various places as I move from Facebook to something else, which may include this blog.

So I'll start with a note for my ongoing research into conspiracy theories. This one comes from a report by Alex Goldman on NPR's All Thing Considered on August 4, 2018.


 In this story, at 2:40, there is a very interesting part about how the folks who believe that Q is giving them hints about Trump's thoughts and ideas believe he signals them. Goldman describes Trump's assertion that he had been to Washington "maybe seventeen times" before his election. Q is the seventeenth letter of the alphabet, therefore he must be signaling his audience in code about the validity of Q, organization.

The number value of letters is an important aspect of secret communications. I got interested in this subject years ago because of reporting on sports jerseys that communicated hateful messages through the public sphere.

I am beginning to see Q as the V as of the right. But that's a post for another day.

Strange Characters

Another weird typography citing...along the lines of Keith Houston's Shady Characters

Daisy Alioto writes about the Dinkus (***) in The Paris Review - 8 June 2018.

Another book to remember...

On Prayer...from Auden's Commonplace Book

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention [...] that he completely forgets his ego,his praying. Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be. The primary task of the school teacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.

(A Certain World, 306)

After Sinclair Lewis

Some time ago, painter Matthew Sepielli mentioned the Temporary Allegiance project at UIC (started by Philip von Zweck) and it has stuck with me for a while.

Now that the exhibit project is suspended, I finally have followed through on an idea. The banner is 4x6 feet and digitally printed on nylon (I had them made by Humphry's Flag Company in Old City Philadelphia, whose store is right across the street from Betsy Ross's House). The text reads:

When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross

I am planning to offer a limited edition of them...

Concordances, continued

Some years ago I was at LACMA looking at some amazing examples of Kuba cloth they have...(here is what turns up in their collection search). There was one (not like any of those...sorry) that completely mesmerized me....it was something like this:

So I was superinterested when I came across a tweet (which may have appeared on the feed of poet Christian Bok, which is a fountain of interesting stuff....) about generating Hamiltonian cycles in rectangular grid graphs. I didn't even know such things existed, but I was delighted by the images provided by the blogger, Pascal Sommer:

I hope try this one out soon...

Another image/emblem

More repair

"For many, replacing a broken object with something new is often the faster and cheaper alternative to fixing it, but a group of neighbors in the small borough of Willimantic, Connecticut, decided it didn’t have to be that way. Three years ago, they started a program to keep salvageable goods from landfills by harnessing the community’s collective skills to fix them"

The article is here, with photos...

More mending

Another post on mending...this one from the Cooper Hewitt...so cool.

Extreme Mending

Superpsyched to see this post from the Cooper Hewitt museum

Brown, Susan. "Extreme Mending." Cooperhewitt.org. 6 Nov 2012; 17 Oct 2016. http://www.cooperhewitt.org/2012/11/06/extreme-mending/

Language of flowers

I've talked with many artists about the language of flowers, but it never occurred to me to look for a dictionary. Until now. And, thanks to Temple Univeristy Library, here are a few...

de la Tour, Charlotte. Le langage des fleur. Paris: Garnier Freres, 1858. (French, illustrated)

Dumont, Henrietta. The Language of Flowers. The floral offering: a token of affection and esteem comprising the language and poetry of flowers. With coloured illustrations from original drawings. Philadelphia: H.C. Peck & Theo Bliss, 1852.

Ingram, John H. Flora Symbolica; or The language and sentiment of flowers. London: F.W. Arne and co., 1869. (link)

Wirt, Elizabeth Washington Gamble. Flora's Dictionary By A Lady. Baltimore: Fielding Lucas, Jr, 1832.

Artists as correspondents...

I love letters. Writing them. Getting them. Don't do it enough, though.

Here are some stories about artists' letters...

Brooks, Katherine. "Sol Lewitt's advice to Eva Hesse is what every creative person needs to hear." The Huffington Post. 27 Oct 2015.

Also this:

Savig, Mary. "The Art of Handwriting" The Atlantic.com. 5 Jul 2016.

Repair rights

Another one for the file on care and repair...this time addressing manufacturers' interests in keeping users from fixing their products...

Matchar, Emily. "The fight for the 'right to repair'. Smithsonian.com. 13 Jul 2016. 13 Jul 2016.

Quote

“I think I became an artist because I realized I needed a field in which the construction of fictional authorities and imagined quotes would be a cause for celebration rather than […] disgrace” (14)

– Wm. Kentridge

Six Drawing Lessons

Fixing books

When you start to notice something suddenly it's everywhere. Here's another piece on repair, this time on books, by Christopher Jobson from Colossal (The Ingenuity and Beauty of Creative Parchment Repair in Medieval Books, Nov 7 2014; 10 Jun 2016.)  A quick peek at the Erik Kwakkel's blog about medieval manuscripts suggests theres' more to learn there...

And it is inching toward reality...

The wind has been crazy the last couple of days! Trying to get a good shot for the catalog is challenging...

More maintenance

I didn't love Interstellar, but it did strike a chord with me.

The film's long set-up describes a world where no chances can be taken because society can no longer afford them. Being part of a generation that was too late for the babyboomers' party and always knew it would be in charge of the clean up, I saw something painfully familiar in the story where characters were encouraged to go into farming and discouraged from breaking new ground through exploration.

Maybe that's what has me following all this stuff on maintenance and repair (which I've tagged this and other recent posts with). If you Google images of 'maintenance' you get hundreds of faceless drones like those below> they generally hold hand tools, but some of them have wrenches and computer keyboards, implying that a wrench is used to keep a computer up. Clearly, the world is screwed.

What you find when you look for 'maintenance' online...

Either way, I had the same sort of grim recognition when I read Laura Bliss' essay in the Atlantic's 'Citylab' ("How 'Maintainers,' not 'Innovators,' Make the World Turn", April 16, 2016). So I wanted to add it to this list...

At some point we'll get to how all this fits together. For now...there's a clean up on aisle three...

This might be going too far....

Mitchell, Nancy. "Broken is Beautiful: The Japanese Tradition That Makes Broken Things Even Better than Brand New". Apartment Therapy. 19 May 2016. 6 Jun 2016. http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/broken-is-beautiful-kintsugi-makes-broken-things-even-better-231069?crlt.pid=camp.pEvil9o3aFse

Article identifies the practice as kintsugi.

More on Mending

Wanted to add this piece by Felicia x on Visible Mending to the list of things on repair I've put here...will have to go back and make a tag for them now...

Latest versions...

It was a pretty spring day, so I thought we'd see how that looks...