object42

irregularly updated

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Hoda Afshar’s series Behold took my breath away, especially this erotic and haunting image.

The Guardian’s blurb:

“Photographer Hoda Afshar was born in Tehran and is now based in Melbourne, Australia. Her latest series, Behold, was photographed in Iran in a town which mostly leaves gay men to be, on the condition they conduct this part of their lives in secret. A group of men invited her inside a traditional bathhouse to document part of their world.”

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Byrne on Byrne

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Eno and the Windows theme

Interview with Eno in the SFGate

Q: How did you come to compose "The Microsoft Sound"?

A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem -- solve it."

The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long."

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.

In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

The commission earned Eno $35,000 in 1994, about $59,000 today, and inevitably, he didn't write it on a PC. In an interview with John Lloyd and Sean Lock on the BBC’s ‘The Museum of Curiosity’ in 2009, he was presented with the Windows 95 ditty and asked the obvious question: did you write it on a PC? “No I wrote it on a Mac,” he replied, quickly. “I’ve never used a PC in my life; I don’t like them.”

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Nazis and the colour pink

I came across a clutch of articles both proposing and countering the claim that the Nazis cemented the association in the latter half of the 20th Century between pink and femininity, which hinge entirely on the Nazi’s branding of homosexuals by a pink triangle in the concentration camps.

Here’s one cautiously pushing the idea in Esquire.

It’s crisply debunked over at Pink Is For Boys.

Here’s a general summary of pink and blue gender associations at The List, whilst the Nazi’s colour code system is outlined here and here.

As tantalising as it sounds, it’s clearly too much of a stretch to link the Nazis’ allocation of the pink triangle as their colour code for homosexual men with the general shift towards a blue/masculine and pink/feminine dichotomy. Professor Jo B. Paoletti points to the 1930s as the beginning of the shift towards gender based colour associations, at least in the USA, though this does in fact coincide with the Nazis’ introduction of the colour coding system in the mid 1930s. Given the ultra-taboo nature of homosexuality globally in the 1930-1960s, it’s unlikely that the concentration camp classifications permeated popular culture in the way that some commentators are suggesting.

Below are the Nazis concentration camp colour codes, which serve as a useful reminder of who they defined as enemies of the state. It’s sobering to invert this darkness and see this as a list of the members of society that now need the most support and help. Bravo you heterosexual-Aryan obsessed Nazi bastards!

Red triangle — political prisoners: social democrats, socialists, trade unionists, Freemasons, communists, and anarchists.

Green triangle — convicts, criminals (often working as kapos)

Blue triangle — foreign forced laborers, emigrants.

Purple triangle — primarily Jehovah's Witnesses (over 99 %), and members of other small pacifist religious groups.

Pink triangle — primarily homosexual men, and sexual offenders including rapists, paedophiles and zoophiles.

Black triangle — people who were deemed "asocial elements" (asozial) and "work shy" (arbeitsscheu) including:

Roma. They wore the black triangle with a "Z" notation (for Zigeuner, meaning Gypsy) to the right of the triangle's point. Roma males were later assigned a brown triangle. Roma females were still deemed "asocials" as they were stereotyped as petty criminals (prostitutes, kidnappers, and fortune tellers).

The mentally ill and mentally disabled. Their triangles were inscribed with the word Blöd ("stupid").

Alcoholics and drug addicts

Vagrants and beggars

Pacifists and conscription resisters.

Prostitutes

Some anarchists

Brown triangle — Roma males.

Uninverted red triangle — an enemy POW (Sonderhäftling — "Special Detainee"), a spy or traitor (Aktionshäftling — "Activities Detainee"), or a military deserter or criminal (Wehrmachtsangehöriger — "Service Member").

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Beautiful and crisp af album covers designed by Fantasy Records art director Phil Carroll for Sylvester (1977 & 1980).

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Friday 05/01

Duchamp painted this a hundred years ago in 1918, his last painting on canvas. Lagging a bit behind Malevich, who painted his Black Square (the “zero point of painting") three years earlier in 1915, he nonetheless supersedes him in sheer bolshiness by never painting on canvas again.

What we’ve got here are shadows cast by readymades (wheel, bicycle seat etc.), a trompe l’oeil rendering (the hand) and physical objects (bottle brush, bolt, etc.). He's rolling his eyes at all the ways art tries to represent reality, an attitude reflected by the sarcastic title - Tu m’ - perhaps short for the French “tu m’emmerdes” (you annoy me) or “tu m’ennuies” (you bore me).

The painting reminds me of Edward Bell’s artwork for Bowie’s Scary Monsters, where the man himself, as well as his art/products, are represented by shadows, illustrations, and photographs (mostly whitewashed over). All quite arch and knowing (vis-a-vis ending an era, destroying the past etc.).

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Visit the largest mirror in the world: the Bolivia Salt Flats

In the middle of southwest Bolivia sits a massive, 4,000 square mile patch of salt flats. In the summer, it's a prime source of lithium and...

Tuesday 02/01

A little salty brine turns these salt flats into the world’s largest “mirror”, flat and reflective enough for satellites to calibrate their elevation measurement equipment.

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Friday 29/12

The silent lull between Christmas and New Years being a perfect canvas for Eno-losophy (sampled twenty years apart). The 1973 doc was removed from Youtube but can still be found on Vimeo (parts one and two).

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The Year in Discovery, Mapped: The 50 Greatest Finds of 2017

From a lost continent to rare seahorses, explore our interactive map of the year's most wondrous discoveries.

Friday 29/12

Too much to digest in one sitting, but the intricately and expressively carved agate sealstone from 1500 B.C. found in Greece is an absolute knockout.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-rare-minoan-sealstone-greek-mycenaean-ancient-history/

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Thursday 28/12

Praise be. This spectacularly weird album (story here, revealing BtS interviews here) is finally on Spotify.

[bonus treat, this vid of Eno’s cover of Ring of Fire recorded around the same time]

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Berenice Abbott

I’ve been reading with wide eyes this book of Berenice Abbott’s stunning photographs of various scientific experiments. She was a master (or should that be mistress) of capturing how matter moves over time, from a pendulum ball to water waves, as well as phenomena related to light; the various ways it reflects and refracts. 

She constantly calibrated the composition and lighting of her photographs to balance style and content, commenting about the top photo “I planned this photograph very carefully to make it balanced; what is more balanced than science? The photograph had to balance,” and of the bottom photo: “I wanted them to be beautiful as well as scientifically accurate.” 

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A martian sunset

A day on Mars lasts 24 hours and 39 minutes (what are the odds) with the light resembling a perpetual English cloudy day; the reduced light intensity is due to its much further distance from the sun (227.9 million km compared with earth’s 149.6 million).

From Universe Today: “Things are a little different on Mars. The ever-present fine dust in the Martian atmosphere absorbs blue light and scatters the warmer colours, colouring the sky well away from the Sun a familiar ruddy hue. At the same time, dust particles in the Sun’s direction scatter blue light forward to create a cool, blue aureole near the setting Sun. If you were standing on Mars, you’d only notice the blue glow when the Sun was near the horizon, the time when its light passes through the greatest depth of atmosphere and dust.”

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Clarence Larkin - The Six Days Re-Creation (1920)

Not my creed at all but fascinating to see an attempt at rendering creation, especially the first one - how do you represent a void followed by light?

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Marcel Duchamp - Avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil (To have the apprentice in the sun) (1914)

PechaKucha 0/20 - I’d like to start with some projects that I believe represent subtle or radical departures from the norm and are, to me, shimmering signposts along the uphill trail for the apprentice/cyclist, as shown here in this sketch by Duchamp. I think that all of us are the cyclist in the sun, striving ever upwards.

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Cini Boeri - Serpentone (Big Snake) (1971)

PechaKucha 1/20 - Furniture that is revolutionary in both its material and implementation. Paola Antonelli describes Big Snake as a "liquorice couch sold by the meter," whose theoretically endless form is made possible through its self-skinning polyurethane foam production. Its radical nature is in its use as a performative object, designed to be extruded, cut and shaped around the room.

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Enzo Mari - Pago Pago vase (1969)

PechaKucha 2/20 - Poetry in plastic! Mari exploited the latest manufacturing techniques and collaborated closely with industry to create this single-moulded ABS plastic referable vase which hints at something sublime and super-human in the resolution of its surfaces and details, a sleight of hand with a single material that is simply astonishing.