bitter cold

Earlier this week, king penguins at the Calgary Zoo in Canada's western Alberta province were kept in their indoor shelters to avoid the bitter cold.

snowballs // shadeballs

postal service

It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.

ATTRIBUTION:

HERODOTUS, Herodotus, trans. A.D. Godley, vol. 4, book 8, verse 98, pp. 96–97 (1924).   A paraphrase of this motto—“Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”—is carved over the entrance to the central post office building in New York City. The method of carrying messages Herodotus describes was a Persian invention and enabled the messengers to travel swiftly. In this fashion King Xerxes sent a message home to Persia that the Greeks had destroyed his fleet off Salamis in 480 B.C.—George Stimpson, A Book About a Thousand Things, pp. 69–70 (1946). 360 no-scope A dumb move often performed by people too bored with a first-person shooter wherein a player using a sniper rifle fires and kills a target, without zooming in, while turning around as fast as humanly possible.

communications down

optical innoculation

optical innoculation - limetree pollen/wind/bike

observation, weather changes...

£3. all day

Indemnity and Oblivion Act

the upper and the lower Waters

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We are forced then to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier - which Ferdinand de Saussure illustrates with an image resembling the wavy lines of the upper and the lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis; a double flux marked by fine streaks of rain, vertical dotted lines supposedly confining segments of correspondence.
All our experience runs counter to this linearity, which made me speak once, in one of my seminars on psychosis, of something more like 'anchoring points', [points de capiton] as a schema for taking into account the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject.

(Écrits. New York: Norton, 1977. 154)

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wet beard

Grindelwald

11.v11122.11

Grindelwald. We have had a gorgeous day been over this glaciers. My boots are a sight the heels are coming off. We were 10 all roped together. We had a tremendous climb for 2 ½ hrs before we reached the ice. Yrs

glaciers of chamonix / crystal world

invisories

"When they use to ride abrod, they have invisories, or masks, visors made of velvet, wherwith they cover all their faces, having holes made in them against their eyes, whereout they look. So that if a man, that knew not their guise before, should chaunce to meet one of them, he would think hee met a monster or a devil; for face hee can see none, but two brode holes against her eyes with glasses in them".
Phillip Stubbes / Anatomie of Abuses / 1583























A mask . . . This is a thing that in former times Gentlewomen used to put over their Faces when they travel to keep them from Sun burning....Visard Mask, which covers the whole face, having holes for the eyes, a case for the nose, and a slit for the mouth, and to speak through; this kind of Mask is taken off and put in a moment of time, being only held in the Teeth by means of a round bead fastned on the inside over against the mouth.

concealed






















The face itself is a redundancy. It is itself in redundancy with the redundancies of significance or frequency, and those of resonance or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye." (Deleuze-Guiattari Thousand Plateaus 168)

grey rainbow/ sunday morning walworth

what is this on the mistletoe?

frozen signal

le Fort de Croy, par un gros temps

Am writing
Terribly cold here

The Gold Rush

In Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush,” de Certeau recalls, “the swirling winds of a blizzard push the cabin in which the tramp is spending the night to the edge of a cliff . After waking up, he walks across the room to go out the door. With his footsteps, the cabin starts dangerously to lean, with the doorway opening onto thin air. If he opens the door he will fall to an instant death. When he backs up, he brings to cabin back to rest, but he is enclosed in a desperate state of affairs. Now and again his feet go forward, then retreat, gingerly touching the floor that pivots on its invisible axis.”

armstrong/ reticulations 322

reservations of the marvellous

Where, you might wonder, does such a history start? What are its objects? Where did the sleep of the bourgeoisie take place? in many odd parts of the city, Benjamin thought, but above all in the arcades. The 19th century had been extraordinarily rich, almost prodigal, in its production of 'dream houses of the collective'; at one point Benjamin draws up a list of 'winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railway stations', and one could easily add to this from other sections of the book: the Crystal Palace [ground zero of the bourgeois imagination], the Eiffel Tower, the unearthly reading rooms done by Henri Labrouste for the Biblioteque Nationale and the Biblioteque Sainte Genevieve, maybe Hector Guimard's Metro entrances, certainly the lost Galerie des Machines. But the arcades are central for him, because he senses that only in them are the true silliness and sublimity of the new [old] society expressed to the full. The arcades are thoroughgoing failures and abiding triumphs. They were old-fashioned almost as soon as they declared themselves the latest thing. Their use of iron and glass was premature, naive, a mixture of the pompous and fantastic. they were stuffy, dingy and monotonous; dead dioramas; perspectives etouffees; phantasmagoria of the dull, the flat, the cluttered. 'The light that fell from above, through the panes … was dirty and sad.' 'Only here,' De Chirico said, 'is it possible to paint. The streets have such gradations of grey.' They were always 'close' [to recall a word that seemed to dominate my childhood], there was sure to be thunder by the end of the afternoon. Drizzle was their natural element. They did not keep out the rain so much as allow the splenetic consumer to wallow in rain publicly, his breath condensing drearily on the one-way glass. [In this climate glass roofs could never be kept clean.] 'Nothing is more characteristic than that precisely this most intimate and most mysterious affair, the working of the weather on humans, should have become the theme of their emptiest chatter. Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos.' Rain was the guarantee of boredom, thank God, since it meant that one could not 'go out'. The arcades allowed a whole century to be housebound and a t loose ends in the company of strangers. They were waiting rooms, caves containing fossils of the primitive consumer, mirror worlds in which out-of-date gadgets exchanged winks, front rooms on endless Sunday afternoons with dust motes circulating in the half-light. Odilon Redon was their painter - his very name sounded like a ringlet on a cheap black wig in the back of the shop. They were waxworks of the New. Arcs de Triomphe [commemorating victories in the class struggle].
For all these reasons they were wonderful. They were a dream and a travesty of dreaming - in the golden age of capital, all worthwhile utopias were both at the same time. ……

T.J. Clark's great review of The Arcades Project
London Review of Books Vol 22 No 12 22 June 2000

strophe

c.1600, from Gk. strophe "stanza," originally "a turning," in reference to the section of an ode sung by the chorus while turning in one direction, from strephein "to turn," from PIE *strebh- "to wind, turn" (cf. Gk. strophaligs "whirl, whirlwind," streblos "twisted").