DUSTY ALTENA

• 2012-12-23

  There are some fantastic observations in Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. I particularly love this quote relaying a conversation between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg when they visited the Kronberg Castle in Denmark:

  Isn’t it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here? As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together. The stones, the green roof with its patina, the wood carvings in the church, constitute the whole castle. None of this should be changed by the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely. SUddenly the walls and the ramparts speak a quite different language. The courtyard becomes an entire world, a dark corner reminds us of the darkness in the human soul, we hear Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” Yet all we really know about Hamlet is that his name appears in a thirteenth-century chronicle. No one can prove that he really lived, let alone that he lived here. But everyone knows the questions Shakespeare had him ask, the human depth he was made to reveal, and so he, too, had to be found a place on earth, here in Kronberg. And once we know that, Kronberg becomes quite a different castle for us.

• 2012-12-20

  The album art for Explosions In The Sky’s The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place (1994):

  

  And the cover for Stars’ Set Yourself On Fire (1995)

  

  Pretty interesting that the Stars cover was changed for the European releases as well as the U.S. vinyl release. Maybe a little too similar?

• 2012-12-15

  Some photos I developed a couple of years ago:

  

  

• 2012-12-12

  This is the coat of arms as found on the family tree of my dad’s side of the family.

  

  Apparently, heraldic artists of old developed their own language to describe each one. This was was described as:

  EC,: aux 1 et 4 d’or a la fasce de gu. aux 2 et 3 d’azur a trois poissons nageants d’arg., l’autre.

  Which translates to: 

  Quartered: 1) and 4) gold with a red horizontal band; 2) and 3) blue with three silver swimming fish, one over the other.

  A motto was not recorded.

• 2012-12-11

  This passage from Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party makes my heart tingle:

  The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

  All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.

• 2012-11-30

  Take a look at the lovely homage to Bruce Springsteen found on the cover of the latest (amazing) Mac DeMarco album, 2:

  

  And the cover of Bruce’s The River, from 1980: 

   

• 2012-05-03

  Ohio State law professor Christopher M. Fairman wrote a wonderful scholarly account of that infamous word, ‘fuck’. It mostly explores the word-of-all-words’ legal history, but touches on etymology and linguistics as well. My favorite moment occurs in a footnote on the final page:

  Author Allan Sherman describes his experience to conquer the power of fuck:

  I put in a fresh sheet of paper, looked around to make sure nobody was watching, then shut my own eyes tight and pecked out the letters on the typewriter—F U C K. After a decent interval I opened my eyes and looked. A jolt of adrenalin shot through my stomach. I had shocked myself….I ripped the page out of the machine, crumpled it up, threw it in a [sic] ashtray and set fire to it. But I didn’t feel better; I felt worse….I promised myself, I shall overcome.

  I put a fresh page in the typewriter. Starting at the top left corner I typed, single space: fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck…from top to bottom. All told, there were 504 fucks on a page. Somewhere around number 327 a strange thing happened: The word ceased to frighten me.

  Source: moritzlaw.osu.edu

• 2012-04-12

  Here is a great quote from Michael Curtin about the effects that radio and television had on that great collective, ‘the audience’:

  …The advent of radio made possible new audience experiences in which one was listening in on live events, such as sports contests and political speeches, while in the company of absent others. Although some people actually attended these events, others—who normally wouldn’t attend—now had the opportunity to listen in from a distance.

  Moreover, radio shows that were produced in a studio often had no physical audience present during the performance. Everyone was listening in and performers had to imagine the audiences who might be tuned to their radios at home. Thus, radio dramatically altered the listener’s relationship to performative events. Indeed, Heywood Broun wryly noted shortly after the emergence of broadcasting, that one of the key advantages of radio was the fact that one could listen to a sermon, smoke a cigar and throw in a few cuss words all at the same time. One no longer had to worry what others in the audience might think, or even what the preacher of the sermon might think, because one’s relationship to them was fundamentally imaginary.

  Note the phrase ‘in the company of absent others,’ a phenomenon and concept that fundamentally changed American society and helped set it on its runaway evolutionary journey to the 21st century.

• 2012-03-11

  The latest Air album is a direct reference to the 1902 silent French film Le Voyage Dans La Lune by Georges Méliès.

  

  

  Here is the film:

  Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris also used this film as the basis for The Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight music video in 1996:

• 2012-02-13

  A message received by a telegraph operator named David Sarnoff on April 14th, 1912, from SS Olympic:

  …   …  /  _   ..   _   ._   _.   ..   _._.  /  ._.   ._   _.  /  ..   _.   _   _ _ _ _  /  ..   _._.   .   _…   .   ._.   _ _.  /  …   ..   _.   _._   ..   _.   _ _.  /  .._.   ._   …   _

  It reads “SS Titanic ran into iceberg. Sinking fast.” The Titanic was doomed, of course, but Sarnoff would eventually rise to fame and play an instrumental role in the world of radio and television.