Meanwhile #149
Behold your weeklyish hyperlink arrangement, plus some squares and a dash of red.
— Another monolithic composition1. Should probably try some other colour combinations, but I’m just digging the red right now. Perhaps because I’m working almost exclusively to a soundtrack of Taylor Swift’s Red at the moment. It’s GREAT.
— I’m very gradually reading Gotham, the gargantuan first volume of Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s epic history of New York City. One particularly enjoyable tangent is contextualising the text with deep google-dives into maps, paintings and other visual accounts of the city, such as this wonderfully zoomable view of the city from 1761.
— Artsy’s Jacqui Palumbo looks at Carrie Mae Weems’ landmark Kitchen Table Series of photographs. Discovered via Isabelle Baldwin’s twitter, always a good source for threads on photogram history and Hasselblad envy.
— For those of you with a hankering for cinematic pastelcore, Present & Correct has2 resurrected the Wes Anderson Palettes twitter account.
— “Our sounds bore a striking resemblance to heavy industry – in particular the 15-ton drop hammers which could operate seven days a week, in 16-hour shifts. These created deep sonic ricochets that bounced off Sheffield’s hills. The sound became a continuous heartbeat while I slept; this subconscious hypnotic rhythm stayed with me and began to show up in the music.” Cracking look at the late-eighties Yorkshire bleep scene. Throwing some Tricky Disco on right now.
— It’s that day again, so here’s Richard Wilkinson’s Star Wars insects.
— Helen Barrett on the London districts nobody knows. Where are NoHo, Midtown and Brain Yard? When property developers ‘place-brand’, the result can be incongruous, inappropriate — or just laughable.
— Rewatched The Lego Batman Movie the other day. it just looks … right. This brief look at the making of it is worth a watch. Every CGI brick was made with unique scratches, thumbprints, dust, dents, the works. Incredible what they did with characters that have only nine points of movement. Straddling digital and stop-motion techniques, it’s weirdly one of the most realistic-looking CGI movies around.3
— Bank Holiday Bin Day Challenge, in which my unofficial biographer Stephen Collins continues to document the mundanity of my day-to-day existence.
— Support and patronage of Meanwhile is always massively appreciated. Paid subscribers get full access to the Meanwhile archive – enough fascinating hyperlink action from over the years to maximise your procrastination – plus the occasional subscriber-only post.
A … compolith? Is that a word? Could it be? No?
Has? Have? Never sure how to conjugate that one/those ones.
Plus it briefly has Mariah Carey playing Batman, which is fantastic.