Elsewhat

By Neale Van Fleet on June 29th, 2023

By Neale Van Fleet on June 29th, 2023

An art project was commissioned as part of the Apollo 12 program, which included pieces of art by notable contemporary artists, including a penis drawn by Andy Warhol. The tiny ceramic wafer was said to have be covertly attached to one of the lander’s legs and flown to the moon, though there is no (easy) way to determine if it made the trip, or if it is still in place.

The penis was famously covered by a thumb when the piece was covered in the New York Times. None of the drawings are particularly ground-breaking or even interesting, but they did have a tiny 13mm × 19mm of total space to work with.

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By Neale Van Fleet on June 29th, 2023

This is a fun entry into a genre I sometimes think about as dumbsmart. It’s a collection of dumb ideas analyzed in a smart way. The book takes the idea of taking over the world (very, very loosely) and seriously analyzes what it would take to actually pull some of it off.

To be clear, all of the activities author Ryan North looks at are really more “vaguely supervillain-esque” than a series of instructions for how to actually take over the world. Chapters include Starting Your Own Country, How to Become Immortal, and How to Live Forever. The chapter Drilling to the Centre of the Planet to Hold the Earth’s Core Hostage is the closest he gets to actually taking over the world, but the task turns out to be essentially impossible, so he settles for digging a slightly shorter path between stock exchanges to make money by trading stocks a fraction of a fraction of a second faster that surface-based connections can.

To echo on some recent themes of Elsewhat, there is even a sequence about creating a floating geodesic sphere hot air ballon base inspired directly from ideas by Buckminster Fuller.

Canadian Friends can get it here →

By Neale Van Fleet on June 28th, 2023

Artist Unknown.

By Neale Van Fleet on June 28th, 2023

This book, assembled by Henry Dreyfuss and team for original publishing in 1972, is a really great design resource. It’s a fairly exhaustive collection of different visual symbols used in all sorts of industries. Think of it as a sort of Noun Project but in book form.

As well as being a reference for everything from nautical flags to hobo symbols, it also recounts how some symbols have changed over the years, such as this excellent grid of evolving Olympic symbols:

The back of the book contains a wonderful index of symbols from all sources organized by rough shape:

But perhaps my favourite part of the edition I bought is the exuberant introduction by one Buckminster Fuller, which he concludes with:

Henry Dreyfuss’ contribution to a new world technique of communication will catalyze a world preoccupation with its progressive evolution into a worldian language so powerfully generalizes as to swiftly throw into obsolescence the almost fatally lethal trends of humanity’s age-long entrapment in specializations and the limitations that specialization imposes upon human thinking. Thus humans can be liberated to use their own cosmically powerful faculties to communicate what needs to be done in local Universe, as humans are uniquely capable of doing – and uniquely advantaged to do – by the phenomenon love and the truthfully thinking mind.

Purchase Here →

By Neale Van Fleet on June 27th, 2023

Artist Unknown.

By Neale Van Fleet on June 27th, 2023

The Walrus has a nice little comic touching on how the Christopher Reeve movies were shot largely in Calgary, and how it feels to revisit the place you grow up. Beautifully written and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki.

Read it here →

By Neale Van Fleet on June 26th, 2023

I wish I had gotten a better shot of this—a puppet made out of an entire building. From Mural Festival.

By Neale Van Fleet on June 26th, 2023

As I touched on in my post about Henry Dreyfuss’ Symbol Sourcebook, Buckminster Fuller, the designer of the above-pictured Expo 67 American Pavilion here in Montréal, was a big character. I recently ran into the following passages about him in a thrifted book This Was Expo, about Montréal’s Expo 67:

He once had an idea for an apartment building that would be put in its place by a dirigible. The building would be made of lightweight alloys and the floors of it would be hung from a great mast. A dirigible would pick up the whole building and take it to where it was needed. First the dirigible would drop a bomb – that’s right, a bomb – which would create a hole in the ground for the mast. Then the dirigible would put the building in place and fly away. A ground crew would pour concrete around the mast to secure it. And everybody’s housing problem would be solved.

This is someone who does not shy away from big ideas. It continues later:

On this day he was talking, as usual, about his ideas and about the future of mankind. “Because I’m in research,” he was saying, “I’m on the frontiers of man.” He looked around at the fair outside, through the transparent walls of the dome. “We are all going into world man,” he said. And for a moment, under the spell of his genial intensity, Expo seemed an important moment in world history and “world man” indeed a possibility. But then perhaps all moments seem important to those in Bucky Fuller’s company.

In a 1972 interview, Bucky allegedly said:

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth again: The whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving that little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. It takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole ship of state is going to turn around. So I said, ‘Call me Trim Tab.’

And he believed in this small idea of leverage enough that he put it on his tombstone.

By Neale Van Fleet on June 25th, 2023

From the small weekend diversion department: the above window sign was put up for an upcoming grocery store near my house. It roughly translates to “New grocery store coming. For everyone. Opening Soon.”

Nothing weird so far, until I got close enough to view the prices from the (presumably) stock photo they used. All the prices are in thousands of dollars for basic produce. Very 2023.