Being a weekly round up of collected news, music, things seen and heard.

• TWITTERS

https://twitter.com/Kloppholic/status/1095465477508382720

• SCROLLING

  • In Venezuela, White Supremacy is a Key to Trump’s Coup
    “On January 23, right after a phone call from Donald Trump, Juan Guaidó, former speaker of Venezuela’s National Assembly, declared himself president. No voting. When you have official recognition from The Donald, who needs elections?”
  • The Official Archive of Prince GIFs
    “GIPHY, in collaboration with Paisley Park and Prince’s estate, has done a truly remarkable thing. It’s created an official archive of high-quality Prince GIFs, from virtually all of his music videos. You can browse it by album and by song.”
  • Great Thread on Base and Superstructure from Black Socialists of America on Twitter
    “How many of you artists/creatives out there have been wondering how/why it seems as though the quality of art and design with money behind it (in the mainstream) has lessened considerably over the years (saturation aside)? Ever hear of Marx’s “base and superstructure” theory? 😏””
  • On Gustav Dore and King Kong
    “”In planning the lighting and atmosphere for Skull Island in 1933’s King Kong, animator Willis O’Brien relied heavily on Gustave Doré. In 1930 special effects expert Lewis W. Physioc had said, “If there is one man’s work that can be taken as the cinematographer’s text, it is that of Doré. His stories are told in our own language of ‘black and white,’ are highly imaginative and dramatic, and should stimulate anybody’s ideas.””
  • The scale of Star Wars characters and ships
    “It’s the scale of significant Star Wars characters, objects, and ships from Episode I through VIII, plus Rogue One and Solo. Need I say more?”
  • BBC fights to stop David Attenborough being poached | Television & radio | The Guardian
    “The BBC has commissioned three major series on the natural world, as it fights to stop staff who make its popular natural history shows – including David Attenborough – being poached by deep-pocketed rival Netflix.”
  • From Africa to the US to Haiti, climate change is a race issue | Patrisse Cullors and Nyeusi Nguvu | Opinion | The Guardian
    “Just over a year ago, Black Lives Matter UK successfully shut down London City airport. Our aims were to call attention to three things: Britain’s historical responsibility for global temperature changes, while the UK remains among the least vulnerable countries to the direct effects of climate change; second, that black people and poor people globally suffer the most from environmental impacts; and third, that safe freedom of movement is a reality only for the privileged, wealthy and mostly white.”
  • The New Social Media
    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the internet will look like in the future. Right now, it’s dominated by social media in one form or another, with large, megacorp silos acting as our primary sources of information and discourse. This is a shift from the “DIY” homegrown state of the early internet — while there were absolutely megacorps that cornered entire niches of the internet (think about the likes of AOL, for instance), it didn’t feel like quite as much of a stranglehold. There was lots of room for growth and plucky startups and homegrown projects. A proliferation of open source projects to run your own websites in all sorts of wacky configurations (lots of weird mishmashes of CMSes, blog software, forums, galleries, with some shaky handcrafted glue between them all). Lots of platforms, lots of different standards and protocols popping up all the time, and nothing really talking to each other all that well. Early attempts at cohesion had mixed success (OAuth, yay! RSS, woo! Trackbacks… um).

  LISTENING:

  • 🎵 “Love” by Unloved
  • 🎵 “Jet Setters” by New Optimism
  • 🎵 “Weight” by Kathryn Joseph
  • 🎵 “Element” by Deerhunter
  • 🎵 “Peeves” by Illingsworth, Open Mike Eagle

  SEEING:

  • 📷X Can Mocan
  • Recent sketchbook pages. – [@AudKoch]
  • 📓 Page on the unconscious by Lynda Barry
  • 🎞 “I’d rather be soot than dust”
  • 🖼 Takato Yamamoto

  WATCHING:

  • 🎥 Miss Sloane (2016)
  • 🎥 Ready Player One (2018)
  • 🎥 Turner & Hooch (1989)
  • 🎥 Man Up (2015)
  • 🎥 Swimming With Men (2018)

  READING:

  • The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle #6)
  • Mortal Engines
  • The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935
  • The Rattle Bag
  • Emile Zola Collection – The Rush for the Spoil (La Curee)