Financial Times headline end of June 2020
Among the more than a million people that died last week were Milton Glaser and Charles Webb. Each of which created single works that grew into cultural icons of American culture in the late 60s. Bookending a time by the novel of a 24 year old and the logo made by a 48 year old that emerged 14 years apart, shows that structuring the past into numerical decades has its inherent problems. 60s is more like a label than a match for a digit column on the calendar.
Looking at the lives of both creators is interesting in itself. Seeing how the works ‘that they are known for’ influenced them is also also worth studying.
There is this romantic notion of the artist and the work forming a unity. One that really gets stretched once a work falls into the amplification black hole at the very center of public culture. The work explodes in its importance. Once it is in everybody’s head it creates its own references and connections. Robert Altman decided to open his more than watchable 1992 movie “The Player” opens with a pitch of a Graduate sequel.
Likewise I❤NY is a staple of every T Shirt shop, not only in the five boroughs.
It is a very specific challenge for the people who made works that got this much attention. As Webb and Glaser showed it can be approached in many different ways.
Much like not just a few among the million dead had specific interpretations and memories of the movie and the emblem. All of which are gone now.
Auf einen Sandhausener kommen weit mehr als 100 Hamburger. Das hält ihre Fussballmanschaft aber nicht davon ab heute in Hamburg 5 zu 1 gegen den HSV zu gewinnen. Ein Unentschieden hätte den Mannen von der Elbe schon gereicht um dann nächste Woche noch gegen die Jungs von der Weser um den Wiedereinzug in die erste Liga zu schaffen. Das Auf- Abstiegsdrama beherrschen sie jedenfalls im Volksparkstadium.
Oder der HSV hat seine Seele ein paar Mal zu oft an den Teufel verkauft um seinerzeit ‘nur noch einmal’ nicht aus der 1. zu fliegen.
Oh, AWS wasn’t kidding when they called it ‘glacier’ – waiting for the completion of a inventory-retrieval job one should bring a book. War and Peace maybe.
Empty seats are one of the most devastating things that can happen to him. He does it for the attention. The fear of people looking the other way, ignoring that gaudy tenants squeezer from Queens, is what he fears most. And it happened. By a long shot.
It is said that some K-Pop fans cobbled up all the tickets they could get. Of course he didn’t question that a million (think Dr Evil) people wanted to come and see him. For him it was just a surefire expression of the love of the people for their leader that so many of his righteous followers could not find a place in the BOK dome. His org was equally clueless. They planned for out door events. A day before the day people started to camp in line. Breitbart had a reporter live stream meandering up and down the white trash that conjugated with the sidewalk in the Oklahoma sun. More flags than in a home less camp, but maybe just a fews Mnuchin checks away from that final state of the American middle class.
Nobody questioned how all those K-pop fans suddenly turned into activists. How they all acted so swiftly and precisely and with intention. Egg on his face? Thats cool and enjoyable. New grass roots thing somewhere? Awesome. Something like this didn’t happen before. The fact that it worked so well should be noticed. The platform of choice of the organizers was Tiktok. Social media systems do not reveal how they guide attention. How they effectively manipulate people. Google search was the last time a social system (yes, it is that as well) was under some public scrutiny while it grew: Links are something one can discuss. And back in the 2000s there was enough tech literate public Internet left that actually had a voice. People don’t understand how they are being prodded by FB and others. Tiktok does so too. Probably a whole lot better. Its video based meme cauldron is complete opaque. And it is entirely AI based. Clearing the seats in Tulsa could have been just a test. To see what is possible. A dangerous experiment, since the results would be so publicly visible. Or maybe that was the actual experiment: how much manipulation can you yield without people noticing what happens.
What would happen, if this would happen today. How would young people feel about this? What they feel is the paramount guidance of their lives in 2020. How would recruits cope with the fact that they would be away from their phones for hours on end? Allot can change in 50 years.
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
Sadly in the next generations things took a turn for the worse …
I found it surprising that the US did so relatively well for so long. Given the material the states have to work with…
Connecting my LG 4K monitor to a generic Windows10 PC prevented it from starting. Only its Fujitsu boot message showed up, offering the option to go into BIOS setup. Which didn’t even work either. Once the machine started while being connected to a DVI monitor it happily used the 4k screen – even in its intended resolution.
PIN 20 of the Display Port seems to cary 3V from both ends, which prevents the system from starting since the graphics card gets utterly confused.
The simple workaround was to use a Display Port to HDMI adapter. That cable does not cary any 3V from both ends. I only get 1920 resolution, but thats fine.
When I was a kid there were allot of birds around. In fairy tales there were Nightingale’s. For a while, whenever bird song could be heard I ask my parents if what we heard was that beautiful singing all those stories referred to. It never was. That, and the factoid my dad mentioned that these bird were extremely rare, made eventually give up to listen for one.
Growing up also seems to entail that one learns about wonderful things only then to eventually realize that they’ll remain elusive.
Decades went by, and I had still not heard a Nightingale sing, still had a very specific idea of how it must be sounding. And I thought this imagination would be the closest I would ever get to the concept I heard about when I was young.
Right now I hear them every day. I would have not expected to experience that. I actually was certain that it would be naive to expect that I ever would.