Meanwhile #202
OK, here's an email. Let's run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.
Welcome to Meanwhile, in which I bundle together the finest hyperlinks loitering in my tabs and drop them into your inbox – fuel for the week ahead. Check out previous editions for further inspiration, fascination and procrastination.
After a period of downtime, the thoroughly excellent things magazine has returned with a massive collection of typically fascinating links (including a mention of Meanwhile, which is always nice). One highlight: behind the partly AI, partly get-rich-quick scheme, entirely bad for consumers garbage ebook market.
Arguably the worst aspect of the current AI revolution1 is the god-awful deployment of it by humans who aren’t paying attention. Behold, Sidney Lumet’s 1957 masterpiece: 19 Angry Malformed Men.
Look at this! Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris, by Frank Horvat, 1959. Incredible image. Found while perusing the Holden Luntz Gallery. “Using a Leica camera with a telephoto lens on a tripod, Horvat took several thirty-second exposures so that the architecture and some people would be still, and the moving crowd would blur. … The image itself was “rediscovered” by Horvat almost thirty years after it was shot and now has come to be regarded as one of his most extraordinary photographs”
Watching the fine folks at Fourth Cone restoring old posters is very much my happy place. A week of loitering in their studio, just quietly observing, is my idea of a perfect holiday. This recent vid of them linen-backing a 1935 railroad map of the US is particularly calming.
H.R. Giger’s catflap.
The latest Pentagram Paper is designed by Jane Plüer and features some of her extensive collection of modernist poster stamps – “these mini masterpieces originated in nineteenth-century Europe and are now highly valued as an important part of the history of graphic design, popular art and social tradition”.
251 words you can spell with a calculator.2
It’s fascinating to see Nirvana’s second life as ubiquitous line of t-shirts is now pulling other Gen X staples onto the high street. A quick scroll through H&M’s current selection and you’ve got The Jesus and Mary Chain, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Chemical Brothers, Alice in Chains, The Smashing Pumpkins. Do the kids even know these bands? Does it matter?
That is all.
Revolution feels like the wrong word, doesn’t it? Far too hopeful. Uprising maybe? Calamity? Apocalypse?
I would add the utterly horrific 58081704 to that list.
Love the image of Gare Saint-Lazare here.