skandalon

A longer explanation follows, but if you’re in a hurry simply know this: this Tumblr named Skandalon is not updated anymore. However, if you still want to follow my activities (and see similar content) than you should head over to aphelis.tumblr.com : it’s a mirror of my Wordpress blog where I’ve been publishing stuff on a weekly basis for the past year and a half. Alternatively, one can monitor this content on Facebook and Twitter.

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Although I haven’t updated this Tumblr blog for a while, I haven’t stop producing content. As I explained a little over a year ago, I moved my activities over a self-hosted Wordpress blog. There, I post entries similar to those one can find here, on Skandalon (see the archive for a quick overlook): vintage photos, movie related images, paintings from past and present artists and occasional quotes from novel or philosophy books. I publish less often (weekly instead of daily), but I try to put more research and thoughts into each post. And just as I used to do here, I systematically provide adequate source attribution (original author, relevant URL, date, etc.).

It’s clear that following a Wordpress blog through RSS syndication is not as convenient as following a blog through one’s Tumblr dashboard. Tumblr users love their dashboard (I know, I was a Tumblr user for more than two years).

Skandalon –the blog you’re currently following– is an indexed blog (Google and other engines are allowed to search and index it). I was not willing to duplicate content from my new Wordpress blog over here: duplicating content is something to avoid (read what Google has to say about this). What to do?

I set up a brand new Tumblr blog which is and will remain and active, unindexed mirror of my main Wordpress blog (I'm using the Wordpress plugin Tumblrize to push a copy of each new post appearing on Wordpress to Tumblr). Since this new Tumblr blog is not indexed, it won’t exist to the eyes of any search engines (one will not be able to find its content through a Google search, for example).

The sole purpose of aphelis.tumblr.com is to allow Tumblr users interested in doing so to easily monitor new content produced on Aphelis.net on their personal Tumblr dashboard.

I’ve already pushed some posts over the new Tumblr blog: there’s a post about Jeremy Geddes paintings, a small comment by photographer Martin Parr about what he calls the “Facebook syndrome”, a quote from artist László Moholy-Nagy, Jason Salavon’s experiment averaging “Every Playboy Centerfold” for the past four decades, a comic strip by Quino and I dug up the story behind the photo showing Dennis Hopper, John Ford and John Huston in the same bed. It gives a good idea of what is coming out of Aphelis.net on a weekly basis.

Damian Loeb: "Enhance 34 to 36 (Center In, Pull Back, Stop)" 2003

Wikimedia Commons: Lakeview #1 oil gusher, Kern County, California, USA, after the well had partially subsided, the derrick removed, and the well surrounded by a sandbag berm. Photo by W.C. Mendenhall, US Geological Survey, 1910

Higher Pictures: "Untitled" by Alfred Gescheidt, vintage gelatin silver print, 1970

Alfred Gescheidt is a professional photographer born in Queens, New York on December 19, 1926. He won a scholarship to the Art Students’ League and studied with Will Barnet and Harry Sternberg. He served briefly in the Navy during World War II, then went to the University of New Mexico and studied with Raymond Johnson. He decided to become a photographer and transferred to the Los Angeles Art Center School and here studied with George Hoyningen-Huene. In the 1950s he documented life on city streets and beaches of America. (Escape Into Life: Alfred Geischeidt)

John Clendenen: no 2 from his Early series [click for hi-res]

Ryan McGinley: Photographs, "Falling Sunset", 2006

Mitsuo Katsui: Pleats Please, Issey Miyake:Elfin Light poster, 1997

9 0 0 0 photostream on Flickr: "" (Alain Turing In Da House), October 2010

The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection: "United States" by David H. Burr, 1833, published by J.H. Colton (reference: Ristow, p. 315, P-Maps 888)

This is the first year of Colton's map publishing business. Ristow says that Colton published his first map in 1833, Burr's map of New York State; this U.S. map must be as early. The graphic style is similar to Burr's Universal Atlas maps, engraved the following year. With six detailed and elegant inset maps showing the environs of Albany, Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Baltimore & Washington; plus a small inset map of South Part of Florida. Outline color, folded into dark teal leather covers 13.5x8 with "Burr's Map of the United States Published By J.H. Colton & Co. New York" and a decorative border stamped in gilt. Prime meridians: Greenwich and Washington.

About this collection:

The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 25 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century maps of North and South America, although it also has maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children's, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1700 to 1950s. Digitization of the collection began in 1996 and there are now over 21,000 items online, with new additions added regularly. The site is free and open to the public. Here viewers have access not only to high resolution images of maps that are extensively cataloged, but also to a variety of tools that allow to users to compare, analyze, and view items in new and experimental ways. (About)

XKCD no 802: "Online Communities 2"

XKCD updated his famous Online Communities map (the first one was released in 2007). Tumblr appears North of the Photoblogs island, in the Sea of Opinions. About this map:

Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community's current size and health. This updated map uses size to represent total social activity in a community ― that is, how much talking, playing, sharing, or other socializing happens there. This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best and tried to be consistent. Estimates are based on the best numbers I could find, but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, nonrandom sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct (i.e. making things up). Sources of data include Google and Bing, Wikipedia, Alexa, Big-Boards.com, StumbleUpon, Wordpress, Askimet, every website statistics page I could find, press releases, news articles, and individual site employees. Tanks in particular to folks at Last.fm, LiveJournal, Reddit, and The New York Times, as well as sysadmins at a number of sites who shared statistics on condition of anonymity.

Life ― Hosted by Google: "Full frame of movie audience wearing special 3D glasses to view film "Bwana Devil" which was shot with new "natural vision" 3 dimensional technology." photo by J.R. Eyerman, Paramount Theater, Hollywood, California, November 26, 1952.

This photo is well known, though it's origin is not. It appears on the cover of the English translation of Guy Debord La Société du Spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle, tr. by Fredy Perlman and Jon Supak, Black & Red, 1970; available online). It was originally taken by Life photographer J.R. Eyerman (1906-1985) at "the premiere screening of film 'Bwana Devil,' directed by Arch Oboler, the 1st full-length, color 3D (aka 'Natural Vision') motion picture" (Life.com). I don't know for sure if it ever appeared in Life Magazine itself, though it was later used in 1984 on the cover of the brochure that accompanied an exhibition of photographs from Life Magazine held at the International Center of Photography (New York) and entitled: The Second Decade, 1946-1955 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984; used copies still available online).

Here's what Thomas Y. Levin has to say about this photo in his essay "Dismantling the Spectacle: The cinema of Guy Debord"

This picture, taken by J.R. Eyerman, has since become a veritable cliché not only for the alienation of late consumer culture but also for the ten years following World War II: it appears, for example, on T-Shirts, bags, and buttons as well as on the cover of the brochure that accompanied an exhibition of photographs from Life magazine held at the International Center of Photography (New York) and entitled: The Second Decade, 1946-1955. Few realize, however, that this depiction of the latest stage in the drive towards cinematic verisimilitude exists in at least two versions: the one, employed for the cover of the Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, Black & Red, 1970, repr. 1977 and 1983), depicts its elegantly attired audience in a virtually trance-like state of absorption, their faces grim, their lips pursed, in the other shot of the same audience, however, the 3-D spectators are laughing, their expressions of hilarity conveying the pleasure of an uproarious, active spectatorship. ('Dismantling the spectacle. The Cinema of Guy Debord', in On the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time. The Situationist International 1957-1972, MIT Press : Cambridge 1989, pp. 72-123; available online at the Media Art Net website.

Robert Lange Studios Fine Art Gallery: "A Short Aria For Sash" by Nathan Durfee, oil on panel 48"x36", 2010

About Nathan Durfee:

Nathan Durfee was born in the small town of Bethel, Vermont on June 26, 1983. Nathan's artistic aspirations first showed themselves in the classroom: a self-described "doodler," moments of boredom became sketches and designs in notebook margins. After spending his high school years in Nevada, he migrated South to attend the Savannah College of Art and Design to become a traditional portrait artist. As his current work boldly exhibits, Nathan instead decided to take his art in a unique, wholly personalized, direction. [...] His fanciful, often abstract, subjects share an organic connection with his informal school-day sketching. While working, he says, "I try to keep that wandering state of mind—as I start laying down brush strokes, a narrative begins to develop. I keep molding and polishing the story until I'm happy with it, and in most cases it's something completely different than what I started out with.” (read more)