geographies: Cobar

 

wednesday newstrip

Independent Australian Federal Member of Parliament, Helen Haines, loses both legs in targeted attack · OpenAI finds its AI agents can secretly communicate even without internet · Australian Federal Police Commissioner says politicians’ heated rhetoric is fueling threats against MPs · T.®ump merchandise stores are shutting down across the country · Seinfeld creator Larry David found the hit show to be "torturous" behind the scenes & compared it to "prison" · Israel's defense minister says about 2,000 Palestinians have been displaced in Hebron in the occupied West Bank in an operation following the killing of two Israeli soldiers. Homes & business have been demolished, with gates & checkpoints closed to Palestinian drivers · twice in recent days, T.®ump took time during rally speeches to talk about Republican Jon Husted’s "ass" · Jason Momoa buys late Sam Neill’s sprawling New Zealand estate · military rappelling stunt kills Air Force sergeant at packed Texas football game.

Another Night in Paris

Recently, at Series Magritte

Erich von Stroheim

Thirty years on from the premiere
of The Merry Widow, a silent movie
directed by Erich von Stroheim,
come these two caricatures. One
is a take on the roles he played in
films after being a director was
made too difficult for him. The
other an invitation to the anniver-
sary of that first showing of the
only movie of his that could be
considered a box office success.


Left like that, it seems a compact
story spread over three decades.
Left like that, it leaves so much
out. Time is a series of triggers &
outcomes; but an outcome can
also be a trigger. The first trigger
in this sequence is Attaché d'am-
bassade, (Embassy Attaché), a 
comedy written in 1861 by Henri
Meilhac, an opera librettist &
playwright. The outcome, some
44 years later, is an operetta, Die
lustige Witwe, with the music by
Franz Lehár & a libretto based on
Meilhac's play. & that, in turn, is
not just the trigger for von Stro-
heim's film & six later versions
by various directors but also an
earlier one made in Hungary by
Mihály Kertész who later moved
to the U.S., changed his name to
Michael Curtiz, & made films as
diverse as Captain Blood, Casa-
blanca, & Yankee Doodle Dandy.


From those outcomes spread many
branch lines of varying length &
importance. Amongst the uncredited
extras in von Stroheim's movie were
Joan Crawford & Clark Gable. von
Stroheim's acting career included an
Oscar nomination for his performance
in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard,  The
castle tower that protrudes from the
bald skull of von Stroheim in Magritte's
Hommage is reprised as a unicorn's horn
in a number of paintings. & so it goes on,
present company hopefully included.

geographies: Gilgunnia

 

wednesday newstrip

Cost of living protests hit Belgium, Italy, Portugal, & France · ebike rider, 13, charged with sexual touching after girls & women were allegedly harassed on Sydney's northern beaches · ‘Mummy wine time 2.0’: Australian mums are turning to cocaine for stress relief · Canada's defense minister says people have been killed & injured in an incident at a military base in Alberta that caused a major fire · Elongated Muskrat allegedly slashed ex Ashley St. Clair’s monthly child support by $115,000 after she revealed she’d given birth to his 13th child · a South Korean army officer who repeatedly left his post without permission for reasons including feeding his lizard has lost a court challenge against his suspension · T.®ump swaps half his female cabinet for men amid wide male misconduct.

Slices of Greenland

In July 1932, in a move presaging later events, the Norwegians laid claim to a part of the southern east coast of Greenland & called it Fridtjof Nansen Land. That didn't last long, less than a year. Nobody recognized the usurpation; & in May 1933, the Permanent Court of International Justice ruled it should remain part of the Danish colony.

      *

April 1941, & the Nazis overran Denmark. The day before that became a fait accompli, the United States decided they would occupy Greenland, ostensibly to defend it against an invasion by Germany. Stayed that way until 1945, Greenland buying goods from the U.S. & Canada to support its inhabitants, & paying for them through the sale of cryolite, a rare mineral whose deposits were found primarily in south western Greenland where it was also refined commercially.

      *

In 1946, the U.S. government offered, under President Harry S. Truman, to buy Greenland off Denmark for 100 million dollars. The offer was rejected, but some years later, in 1951, a defense agreement was signed between the two countries to allow the U.S. bases to stay in Greenland & to establish new ones provided their activities did not impinge upon Denmark's territorial rights.

      *

Between 1961 & 1963, the Thule air base was expanded, & secret plans were put in place by the U.S. to develop am underground network of nuclear missile sites. This proved unworkable, & the plans were discontinued in 1966 before any missiles had been put in place. The Danish government had no idea of what was going on, only found out in 1997 while looking through declassified files when they were investigating the crash of a nuclear-armed B-52 bomber near the Thule air base.

      *

In 2019, U.S. President Donald J. Trump expressed interest in buying Greenalnd entire, describing it as comparable to a "large real estate deal." The Danish Government called the idea "absurd" & refused to entertain it. Trump spat the dummy, & canceled a proposed state visit to Denmark.

      *

In December 2024, President-elect Trump renewed his desire to buy Greenland, stating that "the ownership & control of Greenland is an absolute necessity." Having acquired self-rule, it was now the Premier of Greenland who declared "we are not for sale & will never be for sale."

      *

In October 2026, President Trump posted on Truth Social that "massive oil, gas, & mineral exploration is getting ready to begin in our new & beautiful Greenland!" The US president also emphasized that Greenland's strategic importance to the US & Europe was "second to none" in defence terms.

wednesday newstrip

T.®ump recently suggested that potential foreign conflicts & their associated costs could involve major American metropolitan areas. Specifically, he stated, "They can take out a city, let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay" · a drunken woman allegedly took off her pants and began masturbating on an American Airlines flight from Baltimore to Miami · the President's IQ as per the YouTube channel I ask AI: Grok — 95 to 110; Meta AI — 85-95; DeepSeek — 80-85; Truth Social — 95-105; Gemini — 85-95. Chat GPT & Microsoft Pilot declined to assign a value · a second execution attempt for death row inmate Christa Pike is "uncharted territory," according to US experts · Notalie Harpsichord's "finger-prints are all over T.®ump’s latest scheme to use taxpayer dollars to pay for advertisements praising himself at the height of campaign season" · The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild running at 4K resolution (but only at 30 FPS for now) is made possible on jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles by the PS5CEMU-HAR emulator. "It bundles two emulators, both rendering with Vulkan through Mihawk's PS5 port of the RADV driver & played with the Dual-Sense," the official emulator description reads on GitHub.

geographies : Albany

 

wednesday newstrip

Tennessee woman on death row taken to hospital after surviving two lethal injections is now awake & talking · Been Jammin' NotjustanyYahoo claims allegations of Israel committing genocide in Gaza are the 'greatest lie' of the century · Perth beachgoers warned of prolonged closures even after whale carcass is finally removed · a three-judge panel at the US Court of International Trade is set to hear arguments in a case that could determine whether the president can use a 1970s trade law to impose tariffs on nearly everything the United States imports · Malaysia has deported about 1,500 Myanmar nationals, including children, as part of a refugee repatriation program, saying the move is necessary to reduce the 'financial burden' on the country created by large numbers of asylum seekers · the effort by President DoNuts T.®ump to reduce the price of hamburgers by permitting imports of beef with low tariffs has ruffled the nerves of cattle producers in Republican states, while economists say the policy will save consumers only a few pennies per pound.

geographies: Mardie

 

Just released

Now out from Sandy Press.

pheromones
Mark Young
80 8.5" x 8.5" pages
Published by Sandy Press
ISBN: 979-8994936894
URL: Amazon
Available on Kindle ($US6.00) and in paperback ($US19.95)

Mark Young’s fascinating new collection of visuals, pheromones, contains works of very different styles, but a deep sense of humor (of understatements) is a common denominator. In the opening sequence, variations of mazes are paired with Samuel Beckett titles, and playfully referred to as endless Uber voyages. (I tried to replace two titles with each other: they worked a lot worse.)

Some of the works in the book are partitioned into color fields and based on dialogue with their titles and with the words (oftentimes word games) written into/across the fields. In Opprobrium “Justice /just is/ unscaled”. As much as a joke, it is also the realization of a truth.

Others are expressive freehand digital images like Will he wake?, where a framed question mark is surrounded, outside the frame, with a few dots (berries? full stops? blood drops?), and curves (elementary signs of presence?).

Young’s visuals get their poetic force from the multifaceted (dis)connection between titles and images. The effect is a motion of the mind in-between, back and forth. One of my favorites in the book, La Sagrada Familia, consists of nothing but pixelated shapes and dark gaps between them, but it becomes a mysterious, low key reference to the basilica. The only difference is, that while the basilica is still in the making, Young’s piece feels fully completed.

—    Márton Koppány


pheromones by Mark Young is a wide-ranging collection of visual poetry in which words, images, typography, collage, color, and abstraction continually interact. The book moves freely between minimalist word constructions, digitally manipulated photographs, geometric abstraction, found imagery, and text-image collage. Young treats language not simply as something to be read but as visual material: words are displaced, fragmented, condensed, repeated, erased, or placed in unexpected relationships with images. Pieces such as "The Tenth Word," "A Small Fugue," "Bashō Condensed," "divulge," and "Einsteinium" demonstrate how a few words, or even individual letters, can generate associations that move simultaneously through poetry, humor, philosophy, and graphic form.

Throughout pheromones, Young draws upon an unusually broad field of cultural references. Samuel Beckett becomes the basis of the comic "Beckett List," which transforms titles such as The Unnameable, Krapp’s Last Tape, Malone Dies, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Watt into a sequence of works involving "Uber." Elsewhere, the book invokes or plays with Bashō, Bach, Burroughs, Rembrandt, Saint John of the Cross, de Chirico, Goya, Rauschenberg, Whistler, Man Ray, Philip K. Dick, and figures from popular culture. These references are rarely straightforward homages. Instead, Young subjects cultural history to punning, substitution, juxtaposition, fragmentation, and visual transformation, allowing high art, literature, music, popular culture, and everyday language to occupy the same imaginative space.

The collection is also notable for its sequences, which give the book a larger structural rhythm. "The Calculations" develops a related visual vocabulary through "abacus," "Burroughs," "computation," "proration," and "substitution." Another sequence, "Scenes from the lives of the pepper trees," takes its overall title—and the titles of its individual pieces—from the poem by Denise Levertov: "Cats are stretching in the doorways," "Berries of modest red," "Marimba, marimba — from beyond the black street," "Let him sleep," and "Will he wake?"

—   harry k stammer