*Includes a pocket-sized “planter’s knife” made in Sheffield, which Scott bought for himself in that city of steel-works, and carried around the extensive fields of Abbotsford, in order to work on pruning his trees. *Scott was a very serious land-developer and he often remarked that “his oaks would outlast his laurels.” Since Scott’s poetic laurels […]

*Well, let’s see how that works out. Los Angeles has had a “low-brow art” alternative gallery scene for quite a while. https://youtu.be/RHdGOp9Aers?si=uLYUYP__JmKCdckc

*Still pretty crude, but onsider the implications of this for, say, objects in movies. https://youtu.be/OrPf7V9FcYs?si=94TgejPO8C910HXr

*In which Charles Babbage makes a half-hearted effort to build some popular-entertainment kinetic-art computational contraptions. http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/16/babbages-dancer-by-simon-schaffer/ (…) Calculator or Dancer? ‘They needed a calculator, but a dancer got the job’ (The Marriage of Figaro, 1784) In the steam-punk metropolis of Gibson and Sterling’s Difference Engine, the sickly Keats runs a cinema, Disraeli is a gossip […]

Sir Walter Scott is making a general argument here against kids getting taught shop class and becoming hobby makers. Scott is a Scottish laird with a lot of friends in the aristocracy, and his main concern is that dilettante tech-hacking muddles class distinctions. A hobby tinkerer is “a trumpery gim-crack kind of a character who […]

The Sir Walter Scott Versificator For his 1825 historical novel “The Betrothed,” (which, oddly has the same title as Alessandro Manzoni’s historical novel “Promessi Sposi” from 1827) Sir Walter Scott decided to write a comical parody as an introduction. In this fantastic pretense, the book’s author conveys a tavern meeting of his most famous fictional […]

*Italians might remove the name and the novels of “Walter Scott” and substitute the name and the novel of “Alessandro Manzoni.” Also, Scott’s private “Abbotsford” can be better understood in an Italian context as Torino’s public “Borgo Medioevale.” *They are aspects of the same thing.

Made-in-Italy, and they look nice. https://www.domusweb.it/en/news/2025/04/15/winter-olympic-2026-torches-carlo-ratti.html

https://www.designboom.com/art/coachella-art-installations-festival-california-04-14-2025/ A standout art installation at Coachella 2025 is Taffy by Stephanie Lin, a mesmerizing work which continues to blur the line between sculpture and environment. Seven cylindrical towers cloaked in scalloped mesh flutter and ripple in the wind, creating flickering moiré patterns that appear and disappear with each gust. Painted in hues borrowed from […]