Meanwhile #223
Severance, steel and the shackles of time.
Unused thingy for a thingy.
Did you know it’s almost 2025? TWENTY TWENTY FIVE. Ridiculous. Anyway, if you need some specific bookends for this particular quarter-century, the span of ubiquity and usefulness of the period’s defining technology seems as good as anything:
15 October 2002: First recorded use of “Google” as a transitive verb, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Help.
14 May 2024: Google officially launches AI Overviews.1
I’m sure I’ve droppped this quote numerous times before, but when Carl Sagan talking about books (from Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, 1980) appears in my feed, I simply must share:
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Lots of magic here: Print’s 100 best book covers of 2024.
Adrian Curry’s annual movie poster list for MUBI, always an excellent selection. I’ve compiled mine for Creative Review – should appear online any day now – and we only have an overlap of two posters. But which ones?
The sorcerers at Fourth Cone restoring a rare early Star Wars poster designed by Howard Chaykin. Can’t begin to fathom how nerve-wracking this must be, especially when there’s a risk of completely erasing the artist’s signature.
A particularly good 13 Things from Messy Nessy this week, including the most beautiful abandoned theatre in Portugal; Michelangelo Caetani’s maps of the Divina Commedia; an underground football pitch in a salt mine; and daaaaamn 1920s firefighters were chic.
Gia Milinovich on Severance as an analogy for 21st Century Digital Identities:
In Severance, we have a removal from Time but with a hope of a perfect future; a sense of confinement, scrutiny and control in a non-physical space that isn’t easily navigated; and fragmented selves that are split between two worlds. This is also our 21st century Metamodern condition: we hover between Modern and Postmodern eras, between the Real and the Digital worlds, unable or unwilling to set foot firmly in either one. Despite everything that has attempted to separate the Innies in Severance from a grounding in The Real, they discover Connection, Love, Responsibility and a sense of Sacrifice for the greater good. Most importantly, however, they find Compassion for their fellow humans beings, which comes automatically when they realise- or remember- that they are all fully-rounded, fully-emotional human beings with a real life and history that exists in the natural world outside of the unreal space they find themselves in.
You’ve seen the Dick Van Dyke Coldplay video already, but just in case you haven’t, here’s the Dick Van Dyke Coldplay video. It’s LOVELY.
Rob Stephenson is photographing every neighbourhood of New York “in an effort to create some sort of photographic document of modern-day New York, or at least a record of what I find interesting on any particular day”. Alongside the weekly newslettered pictures, he includes lots of interesting historical facts about each ‘hood and basically the whole thing is VERY up my street.
Hammered stainless steel placemats from John Lewis, you say? Sounds innocuous enough. What could possibly go … oh my
That is all.
Freelancers, here’s a fun game! Google the typical fees expected for your particular trade, then see how quickly you can punch a wall after seeing the AI overview that invariably plucks the smallest number off the internet! Extra points if you get down to the bone!
Municipal Gothic is very much my A/W wardrobe.
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I had not seen the Dick Van Dyke video. That's made my week. Thank you for sharing.