Music | Connan Mockasin

Hail thee, the new masters of psychedelic whimsy. This is the shit.

King Harvest has surely come

I was reading about Jessica Helfand, who together with William Drenttel form Winterhouse, a design studio in Northwest Connecticut. She is Senior Critic at Yale School of Art, where she is an Associate Fellow in Jonathan Edwards College.

Watch this video!  Even if you're not interested in what they say about design, their house is perfection.  And they have my favourite dogs!

Six hangovers

P.G. Wodehouse, best known today for depicting pre-war English, upperclass society in his Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, was the first to document the six original varieties of hangover in his novel The Mating Season.

"I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover — the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all."

They have been described by others in the following way:

1. The Broken Compass

"The Broken Compass attacks the senses of balance and direction and its symptoms include stumbling, colliding with objects which under normal circumstances one would find it easy to avoid, falling, tripping, disorientation, dizziness, aimless wandering, and the sudden and crippling inability to find one’s way home. In extreme cases such as the one illustrated, the victim becomes so disoriented they fall to the ground they know not where, unable to move.

A rare variant of this form of hangover is known as Shatner's Compass. This affliction causes a peculiar sense of detachment from reality, giving its victims the sense of floating outside themselves."

2. The Sewing Machine

"The Sewing Machine affects the nervous system and its symptoms include shaking, the inability to move one’s limbs in the direction desired by the brain, the physical inability to talk due to jaw malfunction or other nervous defect, and sudden involuntary movements.

An oft-experienced aspect of the sewing machine is known as the Carpet Layer - a curious malady that causes the sufferer to feel as though the inside of their mouth has been carpeted over by a mysterious gnome."

3. The Comet

"The Comet has been praised by philosophers for its simplicity, which is often said to be beautiful in a mathematical sense. It has only a single symptom, which is the forcible expulsion of the contents of the stomach through the mouth."

4. The Atomic

"The Atomic attacks the brain and, although its effects can contribute to one or other of the metaphysical hangovers, the Atomic itself is strictly physical. Its symptoms include many varieties of headache and, in extreme cases, deafness."

5. The Cement Mixer

"The Cement Mixer attacks the digestive system, and its symptoms include abdominal pains and abnormal lavatorial experiences. The Cement Mixer often becomes apparent after its victim has begun to eat something."

6. The Gremlin Boogie

"The Gremlin Boogie is the only one of the eleven hangovers which has the peculiar distinction of being enjoyable, and is thus sought out by hangover connoisseurs. It is a psychological condition that enables the sufferer to revel in their hungover state* and to draw a peculiar kind of energy from their circumstances. It is almost always experienced in groups and its symptoms include an unfounded sense of wellbeing, hysterical laughter, the desire to buy goods which at other times would be deemed unnecessary and a masochistic enjoyment of the other types of hangover. Most commonly, it fuels within the sufferer a rampant desire to continue drinking, the victim becoming so caught up in the joy of the communal hangover that he or she cannot bear for the experience to end. Indeed, it is generally wise to allow the Gremlin Boogie to run its course."

These were categorized on GreeneHighway, so go have a look to note wonderful recent additions as "The French Horn", "The Happy Chef", "The Fear", "Mr Batey", and my favourite: "The False Dawn".

Film | Hell and Back Again

Unless you have a personal connection, the war in Afghanistan is an abstraction. After nearly ten years since the initial invasion, the daily bombings and ongoing violence has become mundane, almost ordinary. It is tempting to become indifferent to the horror and pain. It is much easier to look away from the victims. It is much easier to lead a life without rude interruptions from complex insurgencies in distant lands. But it is when we take this easier path, the suffering becomes of no consequence and therefore meaningless. The anguish becomes invisible, an abstraction. It is when society becomes numb to inhumanity; horror is allowed to spread in darkness.

- Hell and Back Again

Scary.

No digital traces found...

Check out Personas - an MIT experiment.  Enter your name on the website...

...and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data.  It will then give you something like this:

The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Unfortunately, I'm the only Freya McOmish in the world (I think) so it just replied with "no digital traces found" - but other people may have more luck!

via Peter, thank you!

Heidegger Heidegger was a boozy beggar

"What gets said in the call of conscience? Heidegger is crystal clear: like Cordelia in King Lear, nothing is said. The call of conscience is silent. It contains no instructions or advice. In order to understand this, it is important to grasp that, for Heidegger, inauthentic life is characterised by chatter – for example, the ever-ambiguous hubbub of the blogosphere. Conscience calls Dasein back from this chatter silently. It has the character of what Heidegger calls "reticence" (Verschwiegenheit), which is the privileged mode of language in Heidegger. So, the call of conscience is a silent call that silences the chatter of the world and brings me back to myself."

Simon Critchley, Being and Time, part 7: Conscience, at the Guardian

( via A Myth in Creation )

Unfortunately I wasn't around to chat with him on this park bench, as our being and time did not coexist.

Colour me Pantone

271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book.

In 1692 an artist known only as “A. Boogert” sat down to write a book in Dutch about mixing watercolors. Not only would he begin the book with a bit about the use of color in painting, but would go on to explain how to create certain hues and change the tone by adding one, two, or three parts of water. The premise sounds simple enough, but the final product is almost unfathomable in its detail and scope.

- (via This is Colossal)

Life's a beach

Some images by Massimo Vital

Short film | Muta by Lucrecia Martel

A short film for Mui Mui - beautiful and very creepy.



I like:

• Fast and slow editing
• Hidden faces
• Incredible, haunting sound effects

TED | How I became 100 artists

"How do you stage an international art show with work from 100 different artists? If you're Shea Hembrey, you invent all of the artists and artwork yourself -- from large-scale outdoor installations to tiny paintings drawn with a single-haired brush. Watch this funny, mind-bending talk to see the explosion of creativity and diversity of skills a single artist is capable of." -- TED Talks

Wayne Thiebaud

{ Wayne Thiebaud “Girl With The Pink Hat” 1973 }

Haute street looks at Paris fashion week

Tommy Ton photos from Paris fashion week - more here

Short film | The man and the thief

The Man and the Thief from Freya McOmish on Vimeo.
Short silent film created for Introduction to Film Production BFP100 at SAE with Joel Plunkett, David McDonald, Steven Lawor and myself. No dialogue allowed, 3 minutes.

Starring: Renee Johnson, Michael Jones and Peter Bjerregaard.

Enjoy!

The Maserati Medici I of the 1970′s

Oh! What a lovely war