Ryba means fish
Re Bar, 8/2 Locomotive St, Eveleigh, NSW wearere.com.au
RE Bar - Two Australian bars make it into the World's 50 Best Bars 2022 longlist
Envisioned by the Gino Volpato
When I write about the 16th century, I’m writing about really raw power, inequality, poverty, exploitation, battles over scarce resources, overt misogyny. A backwards society, a superstitious society. And actually, I think most of the world still works like that. And so nobody can really convince me that historical fiction isn’t relevant.
Hilary Mantel Thinks the Last Book Is Her Best
Good carpenters Thijs Bankers
New York Times Op-Ed: Our Memory Is Flawed. Luckily, God’s Isn’t., by Tish Harrison Warren (Priest, Anglican Church; Author, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (2021) (Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year)):
Mom is in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s disease. She knows who we are and remembers everyone’s names. She can tell you who her third-grade teacher was, but not what happened a week ago or a month ago or 10 minutes ago. ... I wonder in the months and years to come what she will continue to remember about her life, about who she used to be.
Memory, for all of us, speaks to our inherent limitations. Forgetting is part of what it is to be human. That becomes more evident when facing Alzheimer’s. But even for those of us who do not have dementia, almost all of our days have faded from view.
What was I doing three years ago today? Or five? Or ten? What conversations did I have? Who was I with? Did I find joy or discouragement that day? I have no idea. I can only tell you the broad outline: where I lived, where I worked, how old I was. The details — those invaluable and ordinary conversations, coincidences and choices that make up each day of our lives — are lost to time. There are, of course, beautiful memories that we hold onto, moments that glow amber in our minds. And dark moments that we may rather erase. But even our most precious days may eventually be forgotten. ...
It’s curtains
A random selection, starting with some architectural illustration by Michael Paul Lewis / landscapes by Clare Purser / paintings by Lotta Camilla Teale / art by Ian Beck / electronic sculptures by Eirik Brandal / Birkenhead’s ‘palace’ of outsider art / The Hobbit at 40. More Hobbit, which you can play online with this walkthrough to hand / something else that’s 40 this month, the Citroën BX, a design by Marcello Gandini that started life as the Volvo Tundra Concept / Luna House, Chile, by Pezo von Ellrichshausen / Hadrian’s Wall and the never-ending footnote / a short history of the drum machine / the domestic uncanny by Brooke Didonato.
We are all hoarders now’
Digital hoarding: All is not vanity, an essay by Noga Arikha on our digital archives – ‘a new state of affairs in human history… no one knows quite what to do with the eerie fact that we seem to have stronger existences virtually than in our daily lives.’ (via MeFi) / some other things. An interview with Kate Beaton / Soundscapesby Coda to Coda / ‘Chris Watson of Cabaret VoltaireFound a Second Career in Nature Recordings‘ / music recommendations at Jangle Pop Hub / 25 Years of Winchester Caravans, an article from 1936 posted at RV History / Dries Depoorter’s project The Followerlooks a fair bit cleverer than it actually is – there’s a lot of legwork going on here. The basic premise, however, is sound: information is too easily scattered around like confetti (via PetaPixel).
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Some architecture things. Architecture in Music, photography of musical instrument interiors by Charles Brooks, via ARCHIobjects, via MeFi / a couple of paranormal ones: the time slips of Liverpool’s Bold Street / Ukraine’s Astronomers Say There Are Tons of UFOs Over Kyiv / a tour of Burj Al Babas, a ‘Massive Abandoned Town of Disney-esque Castles’, previously noted here and elsewhere and a popular urbex destination / modernism and villainy: ‘How One Modernist Building in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest Changed Cinema Forever‘.
Sort of related, was the (new) King right about architecture all along? Spoiler, probably not, but the qualified success of developments like Poundbury has a lot to do with how it is maintained. In the case of private estates, that means extensive codes and covenants (pdf) that have to be carefully policed. An interesting counterpoint: The “Royal” Greenwich estate where squalor reigns / Oliver Wainwright on the far from straightforward history of ‘ideal cities’: ‘will the world ever be ready for a linear metropolis? / architectural sculptures and renderings by Renato Nicolodi, with a touch of Étienne-Louis Boullée about them / ‘Visions from afar: Jellicoe’s Motopia‘, an essay about a quasi-serious urban vision from the pro-car Sixties. Some images can be found in our archives.
Remain indoors
The tale of the unexpectedly real quest for Reagan’s golden walnut brain, a true story (via B3ta) about a parodic take on the Kit Williams’ celebrated Masquerade (1979), which can be read about in more detail at The Digital Antiquarian: part 1: the contest, part 2: the aftermath / in a similiarly intense, allegorical vein, the paintings of Alan Magee / The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion / sort of related, SALT, ‘the world’s first fully AI-generated multiplot “film”‘ (via PC World) / Skybox Satellite, a tour through the backdrops of video games (via RPS) / the Invisible House, fun, but probably soundtracked by the regular sound of birds hitting the glass / staying with the theme: the Sliding House, living in which must be a festival of anxiety about creaks and groans / it’s the Dome all over again: Carnival of Brexit. Only this time there’s no music venue to show for it / 12 Voitures Jaune, from the consistently amazing Atlas des Régions Naturelles / music by Merriment and Dirt / paintings by Peter Clossick / another deep dive into 20th century London from Another nickel in the machine: Warren Street and the Murder of Stan ‘The Spiv’ Setty by Brian Donald Hume in 1949 / entertaining/enraging tale of the super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse, an extract from Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest. For those who have to ask the question: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse
Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences
The future of robotics. Here are some Amazon Astro knock-offs – the grey area between ‘social robots’, toys, and home security devices: Miko, Misa, Vector, Skymee, Temi, Enabot, and countless other, presumably much lesser robots / a bit of Bowie, a life repurposed as a ‘creative hub’ to sell software. Includes an undeniably fascinating virtual dressing room, which you can explore. Illicit substances included? / the first RV? 1914 Ford Model T Motor Caravan / a new castle by Denizen Works (via Guardian / the ‘Greatest Hits of Synth’ poster at Synthevolution / the Gallery of Beauties / make fantasy maps with Campaign Cartographer. Or even make your own doomsday map, like the Future Map of the World by Gordon Michael Scallion (also at the David Rumsey Map Collection) / the Greater London railway map / a different sort of platform: Platform Art / Pauline Boty, the Anti-Uglies and Bowater House in Knightsbridge / Like a beige, banal biscuit tin: why London’s new buildings all look the same.