Cultrface – a blog dedicated to culture and how it enriches our lives.

Donate to the TLF Freelance Emergency Fund

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My dear friend Keidra is the co-founder of The Learned Fangirl and they have an emergency fund for freelancers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

More info:

As a small indie publisher, The Learned Fangirl has always been committed to uplifting the voices of writers from marginalized groups.

The COVID-19 outbreak has made times especially difficult for freelance writers. Many have not been paid for outstanding invoices or no longer have work coming in for pay. We want to help in any way we can to support rent, food, utilities, and other needs.

In partnership with our nonprofit fiscal sponsor Independent Arts & Media, The Learned Fangirl has created the TLF Freelance Emergency Fund to support freelance culture writers who have been negatively impacted by the coronavirus outbreak. Our priority is arts and culture writers who self-identify as being from a marginalized identity (ex. person of color, Indigenous, disabled, LGBTQ)

As the fund is running low at the moment, I urge you to donate if you’re in a position to do so as freelance writing is hard at the best of times. It would help a lot of writers from marginalised groups continue working and give us the best cultural pieces we’ve ever written.

Donate to the TLF Freelance Emergency Fund today.

The internet art of Mazaccio & Drowilal

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Skɪz(ə)m exhibition view (copyright Martin Polak, 2020)

Mazaccio & Drowilal are a French art duo that make artworks from found internet images.

Whether it’s IRL still lifes of desktop icons, dogs staring wistfully into sunsets, or celebrity snapshots defaced with paint and tape, the duo’s subject matter is universally familiar to anyone who’s found themselves in a thumb scroll wormhole, and that’s exactly the point.

Quote from It’s Nice That

It’s all trés cool, trés French, and trés internet. That sentence didn’t make any sense. But the art does to me and that’s all that matters.

Internet-related: Internet Archaeology: a gallery of early internet images

Almost every typeface seen at Disney theme parks

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I make movies for a family audience written in the Disney font

Mickeyavenue.com is the home to an “incomplete listing of typefaces seen at Walt Disney World, etc.”

Since listing all of the typefaces used at Walt Disney World would be impossible, and a huge waste of time, here’s a list of just the few that I’ve noticed, and the locations at which I recall seeing them (yes, still a huge waste of time).

Some of the fonts are well-known—Cooper Black, Helvetica, and Broadway—and some more obscure typefaces like World Bold, designed by Deborah Lord for Epcot’s Future World area.

Disney and typography related: the history of Walt Disney home video, Pizza Typefaces, and favourite typefaces of 2020.

Steamed Hams but its an oral history

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Originally called “Chalmers vs. Skinner,” the two-minute-and-48-second piece was part of an unusual episode of The Simpsons that aired during the show’s seventh season, on April 14, 1996. While most episodes of The Simpsons focus on the show’s titular family, “22 Short Films About Springfield” was different, as it was broken up into a series of short segments focusing on Springfield’s supporting characters. “Steamed Hams” — as “Chalmers vs. Skinner” would later come to be known — was simply one of those segments. 

(via MEL)

See also: Steamed Hams but there’s a different animator every 13 seconds, in the style of Seinfeld, and in the style of Dragonball Z.

A Gold Experience: Part 2

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all the gold in the world

This isn’t as nice as Part 1. In fact, I never expected to make a Part 2 but I found this to be grotesquely interesting.

If all the gold ever mined was melted into a solid cube, the cube with sides of 20.5m would fit in an Olympic Swimming Pool.

The small gold sphere, in front of the cash couch, weighs 1 metric ton exactly, with a value over $50 Million dollars.

Demonocracy.info also made one for all the silver in the world, all the money in the world, and US debt represented by $100 bills.

During a global pandemic and “meme stocks”, stuff like this really puts things into perspective.

(h/t Boing Boing; infographic and article via Demoncracy.info)

Skateboarding in Jordan

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The Lost World of Skateboarding In Jordan with Tyler Surrey & Friends | CURSE OF PETRA Part 1

It’s a small world we live in. Sometimes, you have to go a little further than just down the street to find certain things in life. This time, the journey took our squad to the Middle East to check out the lost world of skateboarding in Jordan. Josef ‘Speed Demon’ Scott, Manolo Robles, Milton Martinez, filmer Edu ‘Eddy D’ Munoz, and photographer Sergio ‘Astronaut’ Alvarez hoped on board for the mission. The locals greeted them with open arms, and even some traffic control at times to ensure the boys could shred some good spots. Sit back and enjoy some banger clips from their skateventure.

(via Red Bull)

Skate-related: An empty water park In Dubai made a dope skate park and the Uganda skateboard union.

Equiano is the world’s first African-Caribbean rum

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Equiano rum

I wrote about the very brief history of rum a few months ago and now there’s a new chapter to add to the story.

Equiano blends the flavours of Barbados and Mauritius to create the world’s first African-Caribbean rum. It comes courtesy of global rum ambassador Ian Burrell and Foursquare Distillery’s master distiller and blender Richard Seale.

Equiano Rum is the delicious result of a collaboration between two fabulous distilleries, marrying liquid from Barbados’ Foursquare and Gray’s Distillery of Mauritius. The rum from Foursquare is aged in American white oak, while the liquid from Gray’s is aged in French limousin oak and Cognac casks. It’s then married in ex-bourbon casks and bottled at Foursquare, weighing in at 43% ABV. Two hemispheres meet in one bottle, and it’s rather marvellous.

Grab a bottle of Equiano from Master of Malt and read more about the creators in MoM’s blog post from last February.

And, of course, drink responsibly. And Happy Valentine’s Day!

Alcohol-related: The mint julep and its Black history, the whiskey glass from Blade Runner, and a Star Wars glass stormtrooper decanter.

There are over a sextillion ways to spell 'viagra'

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blue viagra pills

I’m asking for trouble putting that word in the title but I thought it was a quirky internet thing.

Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed.com discovered something unique about viagra emails:

Because internet marketers love teaching others about medicine and the alphabet, the word “Viagra” is always spelled in hot, new, creative ways. For example, it might have a lower case “L” in the space where a capital “I” would go, or perhaps an “@” symbol where the letter “a” should be.

After I received 80,730 different emails trying to sell viagra, I started to wonder: How many different ways are there to spell Viagra?

I began my quest by simply collecting the Viagra spellings that showed up in my email. In 12 days, I had 79.

With two single letter substitution and addition characters used between letters, he found 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 variations of the word ‘viagra’ (that’s over 600 quintillion).

But upon further inspection, Rob found more and managed to get up to 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896 variations (that’s over 1.3 sextillion). Put into context, if each variation was a grain of sand, that’d be enough to cover ever beaches in the world (approximately). Also, sextillion… viagra… it was destiny!

Then that got me thinking: I wonder how many variations there are of ‘COVID’ or ‘COVID-19’? If anyone can be bothered to work it out, let me know!

Word related: The man who submited a 52,438 word dissertation without any punctuation and passed and the etymological debate around daughters and milking cows

The Unwritten Rules of Black life

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unwritten rules logo

The Unwritten Rules Encyclopedia examines the various rules forced upon Black people:

Black Americans begin to learn these unwritten rules in early childhood, and they impact everything they do. The rules follow them when they are shopping, and they can feel the anxiety of the rules in their chest when they see the police. The rules shape every career move they make and restrict their freedom when they travel.

There are currently 12 rules on the site but rather than just list them, the site also offers ways to erase them through:

  • Learning more
  • Donating to initiatives
  • Signing petitions
  • Forms of activism against them

You can also send in your own anonymous stories related to these unwritten rules.

See also: The Black American collages of Tay Butler and the gentrification of Black Lives Matter.

The Black Caribbeans of the Harlem Renaissance

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claude mckay

As the son of a Black Jamaican woman and Black Bajan man and an admirer of the Harlem Renaissance, I was intrigued by this JSTOR article by Matthew Wills.

Black Caribbeans in the Harlem Renaissance examined some of the Black Caribbeans that had an influence on the 1920s movement including:

  • Claude McKay (Jamaica)
  • Eric Waldron (British Guiana; raised in Barbados)
  • Arturo Schomburg (Puerto Rico)
  • Wilfred A. Domingo (Jamaica)
  • Marcus Garvey (Jamaica)

Domingo himself argued, “West Indians were better prepared to challenge racial barriers in the United States” because they came from countries in which “Blacks had experienced no legalized segregation and limitations upon opportunity.” The brutality of American racism, so very different from that of imperial Britain and France, shocked them into action. In the 1920s, of course, “the great colonial empires were alive and well, but the intellectual seeds were already being sown for their eventual dismantling.”

Almost a quarter of Harlem’s Black population was foreign-born in the 1920s. They included, most famously, Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey. Garveyism, with its “ideological mixture of Black pride, diaspora consciousness, and defiance of white racism” was foundational to the growth of Black nationalism in the United States, the Caribbean, and the world.

Of course, this only covers the Black Caribbean men. There were plenty of influential Black Caribbean women in the Harlem Renaissance such as:

  • Hermina Huiswoud (Guyana)
  • Amy Jacques Garvey (Jamaica)
  • Maymie de Mena (Martinican and French Guianan grandparents)

“This freedom from spiritual inertia characterizes the women no less than the men, for it is largely through them that the occupational field has been broadened for colored women in New York. By their determination, sometimes reinforced by a dexterous use of their hatpins, these women have made it possible for members of their race to enter the needle trades freely.”

Wilfred A. Domingo, Gift of the Black Tropics

Recommended reading

Calafia: the Black warrior queen

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calafia

Did you know California was named after a Black warrior queen named Calafia? I didn’t!

Rebecca Johnson of Atlas Obscura wrote about Calafia’s story last November and touched “the surprising complexity of medieval attitudes about race”:

Meanwhile, the novel of chivalry that spawned it [California’s name], Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandían, has been all but forgotten (despite being memorably cited by Cervantes as one of the books that turned poor Don Quixote’s brains to mush). Yet its portrait of California’s queen, the dark-skinned warrior Calafia, is worth revisiting—not just for its marvelous details, but for the light it sheds on medieval European attitudes about race.

I like the part where Calafia is described as “beautiful, strong, and courageous” and portrayed in an “unfailingly positive light”.

Other entities named after Calafia include:

  • Calafia Airlines, a Mexican airline
  • Calafia, a hard bop album by Gerald Wilson’s Orchestra of the 80’s
  • Calafia, a hypertext novel by Marjorie Luesebrink
  • Calafia Valley, a wine-growing region in Baja California, Mexico
  • Califia, a genera of Orbiniidae worms

To all those fools who refuse to accept the existence of Black people in their fantasy universes, eat it.

See also: The origin and the meaning of the name California, Calafia: Re-appropriating the Amazon Queen and a list of Black superheroes.

5 brilliant and possibly obscure Black authors

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Tina Charisma compiled a list of 5 brilliant Black authors you need to know about but might not for Harper’s Bazaar.

The contributions of Black authors cannot be underestimated, from their creation of spaces, to their critical take on socio-political issues, culture and science. Black writers have helped carve out trails of the Black experience historically, while also changing mindsets and perceptions.

Naturally, the list didn’t feature the usual suspects—James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou—but there was one name I recognised: Octavia Butler. She was best known for her work in science fiction, putting Black characters and the forefront of a genre known for its racism towards humans of colour and aliens (acting as avatars for people of colour).

Here are 5 links* for some the books referenced in the list:

  1. Corregidora (1975)
  2. So Long A Letter (1979)
  3. Kindred (1979)
  4. Death and the King’s Horseman (1973)
  5. The Joys of Motherhood (1979)

* – These are Bookshop affiliate links where a small portion (10%) of the sale goes to me and the rest go to independent bookstores.

Renovating the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library

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Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library viewed from the southeast corner. The library's facade features a promotion for Banned Books Week 2016, which had recently taken place.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C. was designed by Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1972. It cost $18m to build and was a rare example of modernist architecture in the capital.

However, maintenance wasn’t kept up and it took 3.5 years to renovate. A documentary examined the modernisation, led by Dutch architects Mecanoo and DC-based OTJ Architects.

The documentary film follows architect Francine Houben as she investigates the past and present in order to design a world-class library. Francine delves into the archives, meets contemporaries of Mies and King, speaks to current visitors of the library, and participates in a Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Peace Walk. During her quest, both the building’s namesake and the original architect look over her shoulder critically.

Now I’m imagining one of those tawdry memes with Martin Luther King and Mies van der Rohe in a cloud looking down with their thumbs up.

Stream it below.

A Legacy of Mies and King - Renovating the Public Library of Washington D.C.

Mies related: Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion

(Image credit: Wikipedia, shared via CC BY-SA 4.0)

Did Danny DeVito eat a real fish in Batman Returns?

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The Penguin eating raw bluefish

Tl;dr: yes, Danny DeVito ate a real fish in that scene from Batman Returns.

I like to look at what kind of things people search for to find the site or what Cultrface comes up for in general. One of the most interesting search queries was “did danny devito eat a real fish in batman returns” and it was something I’d wondered over the years. So I looked it up myself. And he did.

In an interview with Nicholas Fonseca for The Daily Telegraph in Australia in 2019, DeVito also revealed what kind of fish he was eating:

The Penguin eats fish, quite grotesquely, in that movie. What were you actually eating?

Raw fish.

Wait, what?

Oh yeah, that was real fish. Bluefish. Fresh, of course. Movie stars only eat fresh fish. Don’t try to pawn two-day-old fish on us. You bring that right from the market.

DeVito chowed down on raw fish as the Penguin in Batman Returns. Yum.

Surely that didn’t taste good after a while, though.

Well, in the middle of the action, I would squeeze a mixture of mouthwash and spirulina into my mouth — but that was because I needed to ooze this green, kind of black thickish liquid out of the corners.

(Sidenote: bluefish, known as tailor in Oceania, and elf or shad in South Africa, is a popular food fish but it is also a vulnerable species due to widespread overfishing)

So there you have it—The Penguin really did eat raw fish when Max Shreck announced he would help him run for mayor of Gotham City. Is it weird that, as a kid, it made me hungry? Is it also weird that, as an adult, it still makes me hungry?

Stream the scene below.

Max manipulates Oswald | Batman Returns

Related: Fashion fish, gefilte fish, and the vantafish.

Paul Ford on the inspiration in procrastination

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I follow Paul Ford on Twitter and I love his humour and intellect. So when I found this 99U talk called “Finding Inspiration in Procrastination”, I jumped at the chance to watch.

Something funny happened on Paul Ford’s way to developing his dream project: he found about 1,000 reasons not to do it. “When you need to do a thing, everything you do is about the thing you’re not doing.”

Like many of us, I procrastinate a lot. In fact, I should be washing up right now and instead I’m writing this. But it’s good to know you can do it without feeling guilty and that there are inspirational takeaways from those deviations.

Stream the talk below.