By Neale Van Fleet on July 19th, 2023
A snappy history book from 2008 which I picked up on a whim based on the quality of the author’s stellar Paris 1919. This book is about how history is used, mostly by states and governments to justify actions. Think, for example, of Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea and war against Ukraine based on their claims that Ukraine was historically a part of the Russian motherland.
The timely theme of History being used to bolster nationalism is repeated again and again in the book. Take here, for example, MacMillan’s take on how Western democracies looked back at the Second World War:
Victorian historians too often depicted the past as an inevitable progress leading to the glorious present when Britain ruled the world. And French and German and Russian and American historians did much the same thing for their nations’ stories… Such histories, says Michael Howard, the eminent British historian, sustain us in difficult times, but they are “nursery history.”
The proper role for historians, Howard rightly says, is to challenge and even explode national myths: “Such disillusion is a necessary part of growing up in and belonging to an adult society; and a good definition of the difference between a Western liberal society and a totalitarian one-whether it is Communist, Fascist, or Catholic authoritarian is that in the former the government treats its citizens as responsible adults and in the latter it cannot.” After World War II, most Western democracies made the difficult but wise decision to commission proper military histories of the conflict. In other words, they hired professional historians and gave them unrestricted access to the archives. The results were histories which did not gloss over Allied mistakes and failures but which strove to give as full a picture as possible of a great and complicated struggle.
In short, history is incredibly complex, and we should resist attempts to oversimplify it. These oversimplifications are often done to help bolster political agendas or even injustices.
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By Neale Van Fleet on July 18th, 2023
A further piece in my series of abstract videos. In 4K with no audio.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 17th, 2023
Condition of Us by Montréal-based band La Force.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 17th, 2023
Like many houses with preteens, my house has been increasingly inundated with more and more manga. One of my 10 year old son’s favourite activities is going to the library or manga store and reading for hours.
The New York Times has a beautifully rendered take on how manga are translated for western audiences. There are many subtle aspects, line onomatopoeia being different, and non-subtle ones like the structure of the books, which read right-to-left. Earlier books like Akira, pictured above, were flipped for Western audiences.
Since manga was first introduced to the U.S. in the 1980s, American companies have wrestled with how to adapt the genre for their readers. It requires taking into account not only art and visual concepts that are unique to Japanese, but also an entirely different system of reading.
Today manga is enormously popular in the U.S. and is published in something close to its original form: in black and white, on inexpensive paper stock, to be read in the Japanese style. But this wasn’t always the case.
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By Neale Van Fleet on July 16th, 2023
I can’t find the artist, but I’ve always liked this sculpture of car parts along a bike path that runs between Montréal’s Mile End and Little Italy neighbourhoods.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 15th, 2023
By Neale Van Fleet on July 14th, 2023
One more take on Fabre Metro, shot through an arriving train.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 14th, 2023
Today I learned about the existence of ‘Coning’ which is when you disable a self-driving taxi by attaching a traffic cone to its hood.
[T]hey found that a cone on a hood renders the vehicles little more than a multi-ton hunk of useless metal.
Let’s mark this as the official start of the Great War between humanity and robots.
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By Neale Van Fleet on July 13th, 2023
A (last?) piece from my trip to NYC a few months ago. I always like pieces which cross different mediums together, and I really like how this outfit becomes a chart when accompanied by a legend. From the the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 12th, 2023
A piece on thee ground by Gabadingdom.