Nitrate film stopped being used in the early 1950s. What had once been the industry standard was replaced by a variety of âsafetyâ film stocks, so named because they, unlike their predecessor, were not prone to spontaneous combustion into inextinguishable fire. A festival dedicated to the projection of nitrate film will inevitably hit a historical limit. Every year at the Nitrate Picture Show, hosted by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the prints get older and more brittle. At some not-too-distant point in the future, it will become impossible to run the festival at all.
I liked this bon mot from later on in the piece:
In his opening remarks, Festival Director Peter Bagrov quipped that an âesteemed colleagueâ likened the festival to âspoiled billionaires eating extinct animals.â
“From the perspective of simulating the warp drive dynamically, the key challenge is stability,” the authors explain. Equations show that the Alcubierre Drive can initiate a warp bubble using the Einstein Equation, but no known equations can sustain it.
“There is (to our knowledge) no known equation of state that would maintain the warp drive metric in a stable configuration over time. Therefore, while one can require that initially, the warp bubble is constant, it will quickly evolve away from that state, and, in most cases, the warp fluid and spacetime deformations will disperse or collapse into a central point.”
Though instability is a prime obstacle to warp drives, it’s also what could make them detectable.
Published in Nature, these results show that contrary to popular belief, every one of the ritually sacrificed individuals was male. Additionally, many of them were closely related, including two pairs of identical twins, evoking important themes of Mayan mythology.
These ancient genomes also show that despite European colonialism, the genetic legacy of the ancient Maya continues in today’s Indigenous people from the region.
These notebooks may hold the key to who I was and who I am now, and if there is any substantial difference between the two. As storytellers, it is drummed into us that characters must change. Must they? Have I changed? As the star of my own movie, surely I must have some kind of an arc?
A pile of notebooks on a desk. A record of a section of my life. messages from a previous version of me, messages that, until now, I have left largely unopened…
Somewhere between dystopian and historical fiction, reality and the imaginary, dreaming and waking, sits East of Noon (2024), the second feature film by the Egyptian visual artist and filmmaker Hala Elkoussy. Ostensibly a film about the spirited rebellion of youth in the face of an authoritarian regime, its narrative abstraction makes it a beguiling prospect; this work, set âoutside of time,â to use Elkoussyâs own words, floats in an undefined space, both temporally and geographically, yet the world it portrays is so richly detailed and specific. This contrast makes for a fascinating tension in the filmâthe question âWhere are we?â soon gives way to âWhere are we going?â
“High-speed baby stars circle the supermassive black hole Sgr A* like a swarm of bees.”
Observational astronomy shows that newly discovered young stellar objects (YSOs) in the immediate vicinity of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* located in the center of our galaxy behave differently than expected. They describe similar orbits to already known young evolved stars and are arranged in a particular pattern around the supermassive black hole.
Ago Bay lies beneath a rolling coastline lined with lush green trees in the Mie Prefecture of Japan. A peninsula protects it from the Pacific, but on a windy day the sea turns white with waves and the trees shiver all the way up the bluff. Itâs here, in these waters, that you find the legendary Ama, the female freedivers who have sought pearls, lobsters, abalone and more for 3,000 years.
And I found this via Jay last night: ostensibly about the Old School Renaissance, a movement in tabletop role-playing games, it sources some scary quotes about US book publishing:
The DOJâs lawyer [the DOJ having brought the antitrust case] collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
And:
Tamika D. Mallory, a social activist with over a million Instagram followers, was paid over $1 million for a two-book deal. But her first book, State of Emergency, has sold just 26,000 print copies since it was published in May, according to BookScan. The journalist and media personality Piers Morgan had a weaker showing in the United States [than the UK]. Despite his followers on Twitter (8 million) and Instagram (1.8 million), Wake Up: Why the World Has Gone Nuts has sold just 5,650 U.S. print copies since it was published a year ago, according to BookScan.
and:
[I]n 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies.
All of which makes me think about many things, not least being how I put a return to self-publishing aside again due to lack of time. Maybe I should make the time. Maybe it’s okay to retrace my steps.
âDelaunay and her husband, Robert, both central to the emergence of painterly abstraction at this moment, saw the dress as an example of their art of âsimultanismâ: the use of colour contrast, which creates specific effects in the eye of the viewer and captures the dynamism of modernity.
âFor the curators of Sonia Delaunay: Living art, the dress is emblematic because simultanism was also an avant-garde method that ignored the boundaries between fine and decorative arts, and between art and everyday life. They present it as a brand, too, and Delaunay not only as a tireless innovator in fashion, textiles, costume and interior design, but also as an astute promoter of her work.â
OPERATIONS: script, trailer notes round 2, tv doc, newsletter, development, eyestrain. Offline until I get hold of this. READING: BEYOND THE LIGHT HORIZON, Ken MacLeod (UK) (US+)Â ORBITAL:
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Forthcoming 2024: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, DESOLATON JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM.
âFinally, at a benefit gala at the Grand Central Gallery in New York in April 1917, Arthur Cravan was set to deliver a lecture on âthe Independent Artists of France and Americaâ; having sunk too many pre-show drinks with (here they are again!) Duchamp and Picabia, he instead swore at the audience, did a striptease, waved his cock around and was promptly arrested. Cravan was a one-man awkward squad: painter, poet, provocateur, publisher, critic, hoaxer, athlete, amateur diplomat, dandy, draft dodger, merde-stirrer, tango dancer, early tattoo adopter, professional loose cannon. He advertized one performance promising that it would end with his suicide.â
Because of its size and location, the henge would have been a prominent place in the region and provided a major site for ceremonial activity. At this time, Crowland would have been a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water and marshes, and the henge was situated on a distinctive and highly visible point projecting out into the Fens.
The henge seems then to have been deserted, perhaps for many centuries, but the significance already given to the site by the substantial prehistoric earthworksâwhich would have still been visible into the medieval periodâmeant it was probably seen by hermits like Guthlac as a unique landscape with a long and sacred past.
Scribbled numbers, wiped-away letters, word-like scrawls: all of these recur in Kikuo Saitoâs paintings of the early 1990s, a selection of which form a wonderfully mystifying solo show on view now at James Fuentes gallery in New York.
Natureâs subtle irregularities and variations are fodder for Jon Foreman (previously). Using found leaves, stones, and sand, the Wales-based artist assembles swirling gradients and organic motifs that radiate across forest floors and beaches. He precisely arranges each composition by size and color, relying on basic geometric principles to transform a humble material and unconventional backdrop into stunning artworks. Considering the constructions last just a short time before theyâre blown or washed away, head to Foremanâs Instagram to see them in pristine condition.
