Alphabetology Vol.12
Posted: 22 April 2021
Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.
As I live in Spain, I have heard many times in the media Spain is a mine producer. But in the article i couldn't find this statement, so i searched on the ICBL web with this conviction... and there i found...COUNTRIES THAT produce CLUSTER MUNITIONS
- Josepsbd, Wikipedia talk page for “Land Mine,” 2008
For what its worth, I checked the latest reports I could find (2020) and Spain is not a producer of mines or CLUSTER MUNITIONS. The US, however, is back on the list of mine producers (and I guess never left the list of cluster munition producers) after a Trump administration policy rollback right at the start of 2020. A NYT article from earlier this month states that the DoD (although they call it the Defense Department? I’ve never seen that before) say they have no plans to undo this policy change and plan on continuing to use land mines. Very cool. [1]
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Art
Funky Pastel Portraits
Optics
Hand Telescopes
Zines
Mr. Sunday Monthly
Music
MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS
Mom Jeans.
* Car Seat Headrest
* Whitney
Dollar Signs
Nate Dionne
Art
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Funky Pastel Portraits
There are a few people I follow on instagram who I think do really interesting portraits that, if not made with pastels, look very pastelly.
Christian Scott does really wonderful portraits and records his process, which I think is really interesting to see. He might be the only artist I’ve ever seen use oil pastels where his finished drawings look crisp and smooth (sorry oil pastels, that’s just how it is — they always look a little janky to me). The portraits are also almost caricatures, but the distortion isn’t just exaggeration, a lot is made up - eyes moved around, shapes distorted, colors are invented, etc. Like look at the Frida Kahlo one - nothing is in the right place, but it works. He doesn’t have a website though! Just youtube and instagram.
Matt Bollinger does really moving portraits of people at work in (acrylic?) paint but with an illustration-y feel. The execution and attention to detail in his work is honestly kind of unbelievable, and they’re just overall really really good pieces. They’re really moving! Not a lot of work is!! Incredibly powerful art!!!!
And last for today we have Jeremy Sorese. He has simplified human forms like Bollinger mixed with some of the more psychedelic colors of Scott, creating art that turns everyday moments of intimacy into larger than life set pieces. Actually, more than anything, I’ve been really inspired by his hands - they’re very sausage-y but very real. Great work, great hands.
Optics
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Hand Telescopes
I’m experimenting with unreasonably long sentences in this essay so watch out.
You can make a hand telescope by curling your hand into a fist (a fist! None of this touching your thumb to your fingertips thing. We are creating a tunnel of vision) and leaving a small gap to look through with one eye, the other eye closed. You can use two hands too, if you want, for dramatic effect, but I’m not convinced it’s any better - if anything, it seems like it makes things more difficult. Better, you ask? Better for what. This is something a fool does, when they pretend to be a pirate. Why would you ever make a hand telescope. Well, let me tell you: in case you want to see something that’s far away, and your vision isn’t great, and you don’t want to get up and move closer to the thing or get your glasses, and you also want to fiddle around by spinning your fist around your eye for a minute or two. If all of these apply, you can make a hand telescope.
I spent a week, on and off, experimenting with this by reading book titles off of my bookshelf, which I normally cannot do, if not but for that I already know the titles and can guess what the squiggles I see are supposed to mean. I have discovered a few things.
Hand telescopes have really obvious distortion effects around the edges, presumably because of light bouncing and bending around. You can actually kind of recreate these just by looking at stuff and putting your hand in the way and paying attention to how what you’re looking at is distorted a little right where your hand is. It’s a lot easier to see this if your hand is right next to your eye and you move it around a little, like imagine your hand is a windshield wiper right above your eye.
It works!!! It might take some fiddling around and rotating and angling your hand until you get a clearer image, but you can absolutely use a hand telescope to see better. It doesn’t even have to be right next to your eye, you just have to get the angle and everything right. But it’s a lot easier if you can get the aperture of your hand pretty small, and if you can get the telescope right up to your eye to block other light from getting in.
It probably takes more effort to get a good angle and see something clearly than it would take to just move a little closer to whatever you’re trying to read or make out.
Anyway, this is all prompted by a snippet of a TV show my parents were watching a few years ago that I caught, where someone was explaining something about vision, and said you could make hand binoculars to see stuff further away, and I thought that that was a joke, and then I looked it up, and it’s true. You can do a Looney Tunes type physical gag and it will work in real life.
There’s science behind it too, although it’s hard to look up online. It works something like a camera aperture or squinting, where it limits the amount of interfering light getting to your eye. There’s a thing called the pinhole effect, which I am reading about [here], which explains it using this neat diagram:
But essentially, the more focused you can get the light reaching your eye, the more clearly you’ll be able to see whatever you’re looking it.
I also wound up looking into pinhole glasses a bit, which take this effect and turns it into moth-man glasses instead of a crazy looking fist in front of your face.
And pinhole glasses work! They do this same exact thing with limiting the amount of light getting into your eye, making objects appear sharper. Their effectiveness has been studied and measured. Going even further, however, there are a bunch of claims about them naturally improving your eyesight, which the FTC wants to clamp down on, because that’s totally unproven. Websites about it veer into timecube [2] territory, with confidence-inducing writing such as:
Whenever I’m feeling stressed I put the pinhole glasses on. Immediately I feel my eyes relax, and I’m able to see clearly as well.
But to be honest the jury is out on what happens to your eyes after extended pinhole glasses use. In 2018 a few people ran a study where they asked subjects to wear pinhole glasses for a minimum of 20 minutes a day between 9 and 11 pm for 3 weeks, and checked their vision before and after. They found no meaningful difference. At the same time, you have a bunch of anecdotal evidence from people saying their vision has improved beyond a need for glasses thanks to pinhole glasses and eye exercises. Maybe the eye exercises are the key.
I mean, everyone selling pinhole glasses and “eye supplement vitamins” is clearly trying to defraud people. Every website selling techniques for “permanently improving your vision” has clickbait blog posts about how if you want to improve your sight you should meditate and stop eating hamburgers. What you REALLY need to do is sign up for MY vision program: 300 Hand Binocular Techniques for the Humble Office Worker.
And while we’re on the topic of telescopes, check this out:
Zines
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Mr. Sunday Monthly
The Mr. Sunday Monthly is a wonderful zine that collects Mr. Sunday comic strips and other assorted essays and cartoons by a variety of people. If you would like a preview, the Mr. Sunday comic is available online, for free, on twitter:
But the zine also contains extra commentary by the author and I think is a delightful little gift to receive in the mail each month. There is a lot of heart and soul packed into these ~15 page long issues.
Music
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MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS - ゼロコンマ、色とりどりの世界 (Rock?)
Great high energy rock out of Japan. It’s hard to categorize!!! The instruments are all violent like post-hardcore but the vocals are really dream-like. Listening to this band is like looking at the shards of a broken mirror.
Mom Jeans. - Best Buds (Emo)
There is (was? It might have passed) a joke in the online emo music community that Mom Jeans. is everyone’s guilty pleasure emo band. I don’t know why. I think this is a very subtly great album. “Edward 40hands” is like the epitome of 4th wave emo.
* Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy (Indie Rock)
I would listen to this album on my half hour walk to and from the studio when I was renting studio space and painting. It got me through a winter together with Pile’s Dripping. It’s a masterpiece of an album. It’s personal and universal and intimate and painful and beautiful. “Beach Life-In-Death” is an absolute mountain of a song that I think everyone should hear at least once.
There are two versions of this album: one was recorded by Will Toledo on his own in 2011, one was re-recorded in higher fidelity in 2018. They’re both great, but I generally have a preference for lo-fi music. I think it sounds a little more authentic, a little more in-the-moment and raw. You can imagine Toledo having a terrible time in college and recording this all on his own with no idea whether his music is going to be popular at all. It’s such a deeply personal album. I think it makes sense to hear it as recorded by the individual experiencing all of these things.
The 2018 recording is by no means worse. He has a better grasp on how to express his ideas in the re-recording. It might be truer to his vision of how he wanted the album to sound. And there are some small differences - the bit at 4:42 on the 2011 recording of “Beach Life-In-Death” sounds very different from the same bit on the 2018 re-recording at 4:52. Toledo sounds closer to us in the 2011 recording. We are right there next to him. And the differences add up — not for the better or worse. They’re just different. There is distance and there are years between the Will Toledo recording in 2011 and in 2018.
* Whitney - Light Upon the Lake (Indie Folk)
The person who ran figure drawings at Trestle Gallery when it was still in Gowanus would play this album all the time so it’s a cozy, familiar album for me. It’s nice to just have on.
Dollar Signs - Hearts of Gold (Emo/Folk Punk)
This might be the first album I’ve ever listened to where, instead of commiserating, I felt distressed by the singer and their problems. They seem genuinely, insidiously troubled in a way that other musicians have not seemed to me. I’m not a therapist, I’m not trying to diagnose anything here. But… damn.
Nate Dionne - Love Is Always Worth It (Indie Rock/Experimental)
I looked up and listened to this because I was investigating what happened to all the members of hit Florida emo band Glocca Morra after it broke up. It’s always kind of interesting to me to see who defined which sounds of a band, and how you can hear those sounds in their current projects. Zach Schwartz now plays with The Spirit of the Beehive, an experimental rock band I’m not very interested in. Nate Dionne has this solo album. The other two members don’t look like they’ve pursued music.
It’s a really good album. It’s a little experimental and everything is kind of muted (intentionally, I’m sure) but the music is interesting and engaging. “Working 2” is a really great song. “Love Is Always Worth It” kind of makes me think of the Kino song “Любовь — это не шутка” which roughly translates to “Love is no joke.” It’s an album about what it’s like being by yourself in a cave but being unable to lose your presence in the outside world.
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[1] That “very cool” was sarcastic!!!! It’s not cool.
[2] timecube
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That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, have a great day.