May 2, 2018
What IS the difference between orthochromatic and panchromatic?
The Timeline of Historical Film Colors is a comprehensive resource for the investigation of film color technology and aesthetics, analysis and restoration, developed and curated by Barbara Flueckiger since 2012
Crack Pie anyone?
Christina Tosi makes yummy looking food. Including: Crack Pie, ice cream that tastes "just like the milk at the bottom of a bowl of cornflakes!", and "transparent" birthday cake (whose sides are not frosted so you can see inside). The always excellent Chef's Table opened their new season with a spotlight on Christina and her Brooklyn-based Momofuku Milk Bar.
Go West to the Sunken Place.
‘I miss the old Kanye’
“Let's be about it, people.”
Of Treecats and Spaceships: David Weber’s On Basilisk Station [Tor.com] “Any series whose hook starts with “Napoleonic wars…IN SPACE” has potential, but when the rest is “fought by a kickass woman with a telempathic cat” I knew I was in for a rollicking good time. On Basilisk Station, and indeed the entire Honor Harrington series by David Weber, never fails to make me thrill with wonder and delight as I tear through the books and then, later, as I digest it, to think of all the sociological philosophy he snuck in while I wasn’t looking!” [more inside]
The Life Cycle of a Dog Toy
This project began out of frustration. Every cute toy I brought home for my dogs ended in a mangled mess destined for the landfill. I decided to photograph the toys in their pristine shape, then again months later, observing this savage demolition with the scrutiny of an anthropologist. [more inside]
The Great High School Imposter
"Before putting the plot into motion, before the five-year masquerade, before the honors and the scholarships and the arrests and the deportation, before any of that, he rode into town on a Greyhound bus on a sleepy spring afternoon, marveling at how smooth the roads were all along the way. He'd come a great distance—5,000 miles from Nova Kakhovka to Harrisburg... The way he'd envisioned it, he would show up to the States and save some money and enroll in a university that very fall. But he'd assumed the local colleges would cost what they do in Ukraine, a couple thousand bucks a year. He couldn't believe that they were asking for 10, 20 times that amount. That was more than he could make working full-time. And if he had to work full-time, where did school fit in? The paradox left him cold. The impossible bind left him panicked. He was already so lonely—no friends, work all day—and for what? The summer was flying, he was expected to depart in September. By mid-July, he realized anxiously, he was rapidly running out of time."
[air horn]
Now the story of a family that wants to rule the galaxy, and the one son who had no choice but to save it. (slyt)
Insane in the mem-drain...
In an effort to prevent future flooding, the City of Houston has launched a program called Adopt-a-drain Houston. As part of the program, residents are free to name their adopted drain. A nickname battle has ensued. Keaton Fox of Houston's ABC13, via Twitter: The city of Houston started an adopt-a-drain program to help drainage. Adopt a drain and name it anything you want. No checks. No rules. What could go wrong?
They were all made in the winter of 1913-1914, the 'starving time'
Claire Voon at Hyperallergic describes a Newly Digitized Collection of Early 20th-Century Lakota Drawings.
The entire collection is now available to examine online as part of the Newberry’s new open access policy that has so far made over 1.7 digital images available for unrestricted and free use. The drawings, specifically, are part of the Edward E. Ayer Collection, which comprises artworks, books, and other materials related to American Indian history and culture. [more inside]
"That's me told then"
The 8 Year Voyage of the Legolas
Do you remember a Dutchman in blue-black leather who visited you? A simple story of a sailing adventure told by the man who built the boat.
Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present
For Moten, blackness is something “fugitive,” as he puts it—an ongoing refusal of standards imposed from elsewhere. In “Stolen Life,” he writes, “Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument.” In this spirit, Moten works to connect subjects that our preconceptions may have led us to think had little relation.
“We will never forgive ETA.”
ETA, the Basque separatist group, is dissolving itself, it stated in a letter published on Wednesday, closing a history that included one of the longest terrorism campaigns in modern Europe, which killed over 800 people in Spain. [more inside]
🎶 lol
The extraordinary life and death of the world’s oldest known spider
SLWaPo: "She was born beneath an acacia tree in one of the few patches of wilderness left in the southwest Australian wheat belt, in an underground burrow lined with her mother’s perfect silk.
Her mother had used the same silk, strong and thick, to seal the burrow’s entrance against the withering heat of the summer of 1974, and against all the flying, prodding things that prowled the North Bungulla Reserve.
She lived like that, in safety and darkness, for the first six months of her life. Then one day in the rainy autumn months, her mother unsealed the tunnel, and she left."
Hold your breath
AMA is a short film featuring amazing underwater choreography, starring Julie Gautier. The title references Japanese shell divers. Via Colossal
EMSH
Ed Emshwiller (bio) was an award winning artist whose paintings (often signed “EMSH”) graced hundreds of science fiction novels and magazines beginning in the 1950s. Here’s a gallery, and here's a list; click through to see most of the covers. He was also a filmmaker and pioneering video artist who founded the CalArts Computer Animation Lab and was dean of the school of film and video there until his death in 1990. Some films: Thanatopsis (1962), Carol (1970), Film with Three Dancers (1971), part of Scape-Mates (1972), Sunstone (1979). Also, a 1978 interview with Emsh on the Dick Cavett Show.
California rules on the new surge of independent contractor
California's top court makes it more difficult for employers to classify workers as independent contractors. At the heart of the dispute was whether or not Dynamex Operations West Inc. delivery drivers were independent contractors or employees. This comes on the heels of a federal judge in Philadelphia ruling that Uber drivers are in fact independent contractors. [more inside]
'Cause I don't wanna work anymore
The Pudding examines the biggest laugh in Ali Wong's Netflix stand-up special "Baby Cobra" and breaks the special down to its component parts to find out why the comedy works.
Calendimaggio di Assisi
Continuing with the May Day theme, today is the first day of the Calendimaggio festival in Assisi, Italy. Although a celebration of the city's medieval past, the festival in its current form only dates back to 1954 (here are archival photos from each year of the festival). The Calendimaggio is structured around a competition between the "upper" (Parte de Sopra) and "lower" (Parte de Sotto) factions of the city -- a callback to the rivalry between supporters of the Pope and supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor that consumed medieval Italy -- and features singing, drumming, dancing, parades, tug-of-war, archery, and many other activities. Here's a documentary about the festival from 2010. And you can view this year's festival live on YouTube.
Randall Jarrell reads The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
It’s a wonderful event. Quite insane.
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