Tuesday 27 August 2019

Words Divide, Pictures Unite


Here are details of a new exhibition on the work of Marie Neurath - co-founder of Isotype graphic language. A nice write-up on Neurath and the exhibition HERE.

Friday 23 August 2019

Version Galore


In 1978, I bought an album of Rocksteady songs that had been recorded in 1970 at the Treasure Isle Studios in Kingston Jamaica. This album, Version Galore, was by a legendary performer known as U-Roy, who used a mix of singing and chanting over existing musical tracks to raise the interest of the people attending the huge open air Sound System parties that are a core part of Jamaican city life. To me this music was almost literally from another planet.

Later, in the mid 1980s, I attended St Pauls Carnival in Bristol, and Notting Hill Carnival in West London. A core part of the experience is to be shaken by the massive custom built sound systems speaker stacks (which are called House of Joy).

Here, is a celebration in The Guardian of the role that sound systems play in Notting Hill Carnival - and a map of where to find them. 

 

Saturday 17 August 2019

The Earth Rotating Beneath a Stationary Milky Way

 

A timelapse video that shows the Earth rotating beneath a stationary Milky Way from HERE.



Friday 16 August 2019

Your letter was most welcome! — loaded with friendliness and with no requests or demands.


A brilliant form letter created by Robert Heinlein. From Craig Mod's Roden newsletter (Subscribe Here).



Tuesday 13 August 2019

New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji (1857)


New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji by Utagawa Hiroshige. From the Met Museum (HERE).

Thursday 8 August 2019

Vorticity 2 (2019)



The American photographer Mike Olbinski chases storms. Here is a fantastic compilation of his time lapse videos of wild stormy weather from spring 2018 and 2019.

Saturday 3 August 2019

On the Humanities (1978)


At their most vivid, the [humanities] are like the arts as well as the sciences. The humanities are that form of knowledge in which the knower is revealed. All knowledge becomes humanistic when this effect takes place, when we are asked to contemplate not only a proposition but the proposer, when we hear the human voice behind what is being said. 

Charles Frankel, speech in Austin, Texas, December 1978.