Sewers of Babel : kerinth

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are up for auction.
What insight do they give? What light from yonder kitchen ghostly glows?
What smokestack trees? What feeble attempt to pacify the hellhound gnaw?
What does it say? Is biography more interesting intrinsically than art?
Or just here Godwinned?

This article from foreignpolicy.com details the decline of the empire as a profitable and sustainable model in the recent centuries. Long gone are the days when we as a type of triumvirate republic could rule the known world for hundred of years and remain the most appealing options. Unfortunately, the ability to create a coherent and believable image-meaning for an empire has become harder, although that hasn't stopped some from trying:

In 2004 a senior advisor to President Bush confided to journalist Ron Suskind, “We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality.… We’re history’s actors.” Similar thoughts may cross the minds of China’s leaders. Even if they do not, it is still perfectly possible for a republic to behave like an empire in practice, while remaining in denial about its loss of republican virtue.

However, the populace will not buck so easily from populist ideals, and will mourn the loss of its own in places that have lost meaning outside of media/propaganda. The author of the article quotes the poet of imperialism Rudyard Kipling:

A scrimmage in a Border Station
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

Yet this time the rabbit-hunter has his own multisponsored education, and a set of extensive ideological values that make his/her loss just as tragic but less ironic.

Armless guitarist Mark Goffeney, member of the San Diego band Big Toe (myspace page), plays Mary Jane's Last Dance in Balboa Park.

Here's a human-interest story on Goffeney via Vyuz San Diego.

Butterfly, flutter by -
the world is made of words and signs
and I'll catch you again somehow.

or the history of the at-symbol, sometimes functionally understood followed by a telecom and domain extension.

What does this symbol evoke? Cats, apparently, and snails, and strudels, among others:

In Russia, for instance, it seems that the most common word for the @ is sobaka ( dog) or sobachka ( doggie) -- apparently because a computer game popular when e-mail was first introduced involved chasing an @-shaped dog on the screen.

So obscure the slow crawl of language, yet if we follow it closely enough it almost seems for one second to obscure the commonsensical understanding of humanity vs time and becomes the primary mode for history.

des chapeaux (of hats, loosely) is a blog solely about photos of old hats, most from magazine articles or adverts. Endless aesthetic icons bygone but vital.

Shakespeare's Globe Theater

Papertoys.com has a small but bizarrely varied selection of paper printouts that can be cut and glued and tabbed together to make small models. Definitely not as intricate as the paper models in Ms Kreant's earlier post, but fun nonetheless to dust off the old drafting table and x-acto knife and go to work. I imagine there will be a database sometime in the future where users can submit their own houses to be replicated on 8 1/2" x 11" canvas, but for the time being we must content ourselves with historical sites and hot cars.

Mercedes CLK

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals ... And I, their sexton slave!

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain! ...

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

My world I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledges once to hope - cleft to despair?

The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure ...

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip
Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower...
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

by Hart Crane

Toplink leads to a site with ads from the fifties through the nineties. Some abstract, some frightening, and some simply fanciful, like this one for Melleril, a brand of thioridazine from 1973:

Thioridazine has also intrinsic mild to moderate antidepressant properties. It has antiemetic properties. Sedation is said to be less pronounced compared with chlorpromazine.
[...]
The manufacturer Novartis/ Sandoz/ Wander of the brands of thioridazine, Mellaril® in the USA and Canada and Melleril® in Europe, discontinued the drug worldwide in June 2005.

Strangely enough dreamscape hallucinations were not one of the side-effects or reasons for cancellation. I wonder if they were on to something with this advertising campaign - I'm sure even Dali could sell pantyhose to a certain subgroup of consumers who identified with amorphous animality and marble legs in the desert to the sky. It's all about knowing the target market and catering to their reality.
[link via mefi]

Reminiscent of the first Karate Kid movie, this flash game Fly Sui has the player fighting the clock to snatch flies from the air with a pair of chopsticks.
Obviously this game, like the little floating laser-trainer in the first Star Wars movie, influenced a generation of skill-builders to do similarly obscure practices towards ultimate victory.
This game, however, is beyond me. Trackpad and all, I have only caught three flies total. Perhaps you micers or trackballers or keyboard nubbers or graphics penners will have better luck. Wax on, wax off...

Just a quick rundown of a few interesting resources about energy drinks. They are my heavy fuel these days, and have long-since replaced such one-stimulant wonders like Mountain Dew or coffee. Although the cans themselves tend to appeal to the extreme! crowd (brightly colored, hints of club culture, slamming vs drinking), they can be fairly workaday. Anything, I suppose, can be made routine. Anything that can be survived fairly consitently, anyway.
So perhaps you are interested but would like more information, such as recommendations, user reviews, discussion? BevNET breathlessly trumpets the savvy drinker's culture. Good place to get a feel for the type of person who will feel similarity enough to talk to you at the bus stop while you sip your syrup of choice.

Energy Fiend is an interesting energy drink blog with general news and a few nice feature articles.

• Check beyond the jargon of energy drink ingredients, and find out what l-carnitine can do for you
• Calculate how many of any given drink an average human could bear consuming before death by caffeine
• Finally a link that will show you the mgs of caffeine per energy drink

That final one really weighed on me; my drink of choice came out with these stats:

Rockstar Juiced 16oz 160mg/caffeine 10.00mg/oz

Not bad - for comparison a coffee is ~80 mg and a can of Dew ~60mg. As death by caffeine puts it:

Gulp down 70.38 cans of Rockstar Juiced and you're history.

They don't give the span of time that makes that amount of fuel funeral to me. I hope it is less than a month. To the uncertainty!

Yes, another youtube link. Another easy out to escape giving the fullness of my own opinion, which may be unremarkable or incoherent. Yet the simple marking of time that I enact with this post is also one of the dominant themes in this video, a time-lapse film of six years consisting of daily Noah Kalina morning-face.

Noah, a photographer living in NYC, can appreciate the value of consistent routine, or as he calls it (referring to his unemoting lips), "a control." It allows for a strange feeling of intimacy between the viewer and Noah, locked in an eternal unemotional gaze while the single-frame days do their slow erosion. The music backing the whole encounter doesn't hurt the poignancy of the whole event, either. In a way Kalina has framed his fluctuating life in a static glare to give a desperate contrast between human and time and place.

Kalina also knows he is not alone in this hope to make his own faces of homeostasis a more wide-reaching symbol, and he does give credit to others creating a visual record of themselves.

• Jonathan Keller, who has been at it for eight years and has grown a fantastic mustachio over time.
• Daily Jason, 2003-5, who says succinctly "This is an art project to watch time progress through a human."
• The Twindex, Sven and Tobias Staude's attempt at measuring the difference caused by time between their shared control - genes

Finally, there is Ahree Lee[link to AtomFilms], whose animated + scored series of photos Me, though started after some of the others (from 2001-4), was made into a movie first. It won a few awards at film festivals, etc. and one can only imagine produced a sense of self-examination in Lee, who produced a counterpart work, everyone. She justifies her work by emphasizing the polarity in her sequences:

This counterpart to Me, comprising images of everyone I could convince to let me take their picture in the fall of 2001, fleshes out the other end of the spectrum of homogeneity to heterogeneity.

I am not so sure that there is all that much difference between the two. Putting concerns of time and aging aside, all these projects are consists of humans fascinated with the human face and its engaging differences. The human face produces a sort of monomania - how to make it react? what subtle smirks we can elicit? what does that look mean?
Making it even worse is the control exhibited in framing the subjects in the photo... it almost seems to cry out: "If humans would just sit still, we could understand their lives! which would be lifeless while siting still..." Amen.

Nice animation set to a duet with Edith Piaf and Theo Sarapo[i.e. Theophanis Lamboukas - check the link].
Produced by French production company Cube.
Here's part of a translation by commenter Steve on the Drawn! cartooning blog:

TS:
However people always say
That love is deceiving
That one of the two
Is never happy…
EP:
But even when one has lost it,
A love that one has known
Leaves you with a taste of honey -
Love is eternal!

Also this tidbit about the two singers's relationship imbues the whole thing with somewhat deeper meaning, and some ambiguity. (Bless the internet for producing ambiguity and tangential facts to enrich and confuse).

In 1962, Piaf married singer/actor Theo Sarapo, who was twenty years her junior. They stayed married until Piaf's death. Along the way, Piaf had many other lovers.

videolink from mefi

Steve Irwin will probably go to Hades and subdue the Cerberus for the viewing pleasure of restless souls.

It is understood he was killed by a sting-ray barb that went through his chest.
He was swimming off the Low Isles at Port Douglas filming an underwater documentary and that's when it occured.

[9/4 edit]
Here was a man that lived every second as if it were an absurd tall-tale in the making. An interview in Reptiles Magazine yields Irwin's description of his wife's labor and his daughter's birth.

Anyways, Terri's givin' birth with her fingernails firmly embedded in my thigh, and this little baby pops out-I actually delivered her. Her little head came out, and our obstetrician said, "Grab it!" So I'm grabbin' it, and I'm like "Oh, my God!" and he says, "No, really, grab it!" and puts his hands around mine and made me really grab the head of this newborn child. I pulled it out, and its shoulder got caught, and I had to pull it up and "Bang!" out she came, this beautiful little baby girl.

It is about time we lived up to our name. Obviously the idea of Babel has been honored via our multivocal and wide-ranging post-topics, but what of the Sewers? This is the first posting of long-collected resources related to those two concepts which serve together as a meme/keyword for our writings.
The site in the toplink is the Vanishing Point, a site run by a grad-student-to-be (kowalski, whose photo appears in the top left of this post) with contributions from other urban explorers like the group Angels of the Underground. Vanishing Point seems to focus on the sewer/drain system as grandiose testament to the support structure that underlies and sometimes opens into urban life. My attempts at describing the effect produced by these large-resolution strangely-lit cavescapes can only hint at the creator's intent, something he has obviously spent much time refining and turning into a statement about current culture (emphasis, however, is mine):

The built environment of the city has always been incomplete, by omission and necessity, and will remain so. Despite the visions of futurists, the work of our planners and cement-layers thankfully remains a fractured and discontinuous whole, an urban field riven with internal margins, pockmarked by decay, underlaid with secret waterways. Stepping outside our prearranged traffic patterns and established destinations, we find a city laced with liminality, with borderlands cutting across its heart and reaching into its sky. We find a thousand vanishing points, each unique, each alive, each pregnant with riches and wonders and time.

This is a website about exploring some of those spaces, about immersing oneself in stormwater sewers and utility tunnels and abandoned industry, about tapping into the worlds that are embedded in our urban environment yet are decidedly removed from the collective experience of civilized life. This is a website about spaces that exist at the boundaries of modern control, as concessions to the landscape, as the debris left by economic transition, as evidence of the transient nature of our place upon this earth.

Now I always imagined the connotation of Sewers in this website's name in a few ways, two of which are highlighted in the above statement. In the midst of current modern civilization, there is something more earnest (or perhaps more base - the id of the city) about the convoluted drain system that keeps the street from flooding than the stark office building covered in mirrored glass that looks to be as carefree and airy as the sky it reflects. That is the "concession to the landscape."
As far as the "vanishing points, each unique etc," the tunnels beneath provide an incredibly visceral symbol for the dark tunnels of human need or function that may or may not be related directly to the city center and shopping district-parade-festival-gala. There is a beauty in them but it is not a public beauty - it is the beauty of feeling for a moment that the particularity of the tunnels is comprehensible to an observer, only to leave and re-enter the topside democracy. The Vanishing Point tries to capture the particular beauty of sewers and storm drains, and to share them with a self-editing group of intrepid urban explorers bent on looking toward the metropolis for the frontier, not away.
In the same way, perhaps, Sewers of Babel looks towards Babel (perhaps the internet? the humans?) for something that Babel lost - coherence or commonality or community - and finds that life is still possible beneath the ruins. Each display here is in some way "pregnant with riches and wonders and time," waiting to be understood (or for that day when the topside world needs the expertise for an applied purpose).

Toplink directs to Small Town Misfit - A selection of police blots from small-town papers. Lightens the mood with which we regard law enforcement, whose assignments and reports don't always provide fodder for the next episode of Law & Order.

Erie County, NY
Someone broke the window locks of a Berg Road residence, entered the home and removed a safe. The suspect(s) then took the safe to the garage and used power tools to open it. There was nothing of value in the safe. The safe was a toy.

Toplink leads to a New York Times article that talks about the latest episode in the disjointed epic of historical revision. Mao has been juxtaposed with J.P. Morgan and Bill Gates. While this seems logical considering the massive investment in Chinese factories by foreign businesses (and withdrawals by foreign governments from Chinese banks), it makes the information control at history's core more dramatic and nearby. The Chinese government would like to frame this development as an enlightened moment revising dusty party doctrine:

The new textbooks de-emphasize dynastic change, peasant struggle, ethnic rivalry and war, some critics say, because the leadership does not want people thinking that such things matter a great deal. Officials prefer to create the impression that Chinese through the ages cared more about innovation, technology and trade relationships with the outside world.

Mr. Zhou, the Shanghai scholar who helped write the textbooks, says the new history does present a more harmonious image of China’s past. But he says the alterations “do not come from someone’s political slogan,” but rather reflect a sea change in thinking about what students need to know.

“The government has a big role in approving textbooks,” he said. “But the goal of our work is not politics. It is to make the study of history more mainstream and prepare our students for a new era.”

Preparing the road for a new type of leadership, headed more literally by a mascot, representing the party's company's major shareholder's best interests.

Pursue further knowledge about China in braineel's China category.