The Aardvark Speaks

A strange regulation exists in the American state of California, called Proposition 65, which requires apartment complexes, schools, etc., to post warning signs if any chemicals used on the property (e.g. detergents and suchlike) can cause cancer. Some of these, such as the one pictured left, do not sound very reassuring. You'd think that people should stop using such substances rather than warn others that they are being exposed to them. It's a strange world.

I was made aware of this through an interesting comment that Aardvark reader Jann posted here today.

Arrington de Dionyso is an American multi-instrumentalist who plays the guitar and the bass clarinet, does Tuvan throat singing and generally sings with the intensity of a madman. On his latest album Malaikat dan singa his singing sounds particularly demented because for some obscure reason he chose to sing in Indonesian; the lyrics are adapted and translated lines from poems by William Blake. Not that you would understand a single one of them unless you are Indonesian.

Accompanied by the brute drumming of Karl Blau, de Dionyso churns out 11 songs that may be among the rawest and meatiest music released this year. The combination of distorted guitar, bass clarinet and throat singing does have an impact that goes well beyond the obvious novel factor; not only is it direct, intense and full of urgency, some of the songs have surprisingly addictive grooves. Even if you don't know what he's singing (or perhaps precisely because you don't know), you get the impression of a possessed man spewing out the fundamentals of human existence. The last track, 13 minutes in a more meditative mood, comes as something of a relief. This album is quite something.

Vienna Transport is currently celebrating 40 years of construction work for the new metro system. Construction work started on November 3rd, 1969 with the excavations for the station at Karlsplatz (pictured left).

It's something of an ambivalent anniversary. First of all, before the new metro, the old metro had been in service since 1898; in fact two of the "new" metro lines are in fact nothing but converted old metro lines. Second, while there is no doubt that the first two stages of the new metro system brought significant improvements in public transport, the new metro is also responsible for the drastic degradation of the tramway network on the surface.

New Europe has published a review of Mr Singh Has Disappeared on their "Brussels Agenda" site and calls it "a little gem, unique, full of its own atmosphere and [...] very funny indeed." Wow.

The graphic artist Martin Ulrich Kehrer spent three years taking pictures of letters and lettering on Viennese shop fronts, thereby creating a documentation of well over 2500 examples of urban typography from all 23 districts of Vienna. A small selection of these is currently shown in an exhibition at the Wienmuseum Karlsplatz, along with 26 concrete blocks showing individual letters from selected typefaces.

Kehrer describes the purpose of his project as twofold: on the one hand, to document obsolete typefaces, some of which have survived only in traces or fragments, and on the other, to point out changes in formal and material aspects of original typography (i.e. not the cheap, uniform, globalized kind used by multinational chain stores) over several decades.

About 200 of Kehrer's photographs were recently published in a book entitled Stadtalphabet Wien, which largely focuses on examples from the 1950s through the 1970s. The book is available from Amazon.de.

Martin Ulrich Kehrer: Stadtalphabet Wien. Wien: Sonderzahl-Verlag, 2009. ISBN 978-3-85449-300-6. € 18.

Zum Thema Wirtschaftskrise:

Wenn wir nicht wollen, dass unsere Zukunft, die Zukunft unserer Kinder, die Zukunft künftiger Generationen durchsetzt ist von Finanz-, Wirtschafts-, Umwelt- und sozialen, letztendlich also menschlichen Katastrophen, dann müssen wir unsere Art zu leben, zu konsumieren, zu produzieren ändern. Und wir müssen die Kriterien unserer gesellschaftlichen Organisation und unserer öffentlichen Politiken ändern.

Zum Thema Abgehobenheit der Politik:

So fängt man schließlich an, einen Graben des Unverständnisses zu ziehen zwischen den Experten voller Wissen und den Bürgern, deren Lebenserfahrungen einfach nicht übereinstimmen wollen mit dem, was die Zahlen sagen. Dieser Graben ist sehr gefährlich, denn letztlich fangen die Bürger an zu glauben, man wolle sie täuschen. Nichts zerstört die Demokratie wirkungsvoller.

Wer hats gesagt?

"You don't smoke," the doctor said after he had looked at my ECG.
"No," I said.
"I can see that," he said.

Die Ergebnisse der oberösterreichischen Landtagswahl wirken noch um einiges ärger, wenn man ehemals rote Kerngegenden, wie etwa meinen Geburtsort, betrachtet:

Wenn man ehemals sichere absolute Mehrheiten hatte und dann in einem Satz von 47% auf 28% absackt, dann ist der Spruch mit den Alarmglocken, die schrillen sollten, nicht mehr angebracht. Im Gegenteil, das bedeutet Notoperation oder Totengräber.

Ever since I upgraded my cable account from 35 to 94 channels in order to bring down my monthly TV/Internet/telephone bill to half of what I used to pay (don't ask -- the telecom industry is perverse like that), I've been watching slightly more TV than I used to. I'm sure it's temporary though, mostly because the ubiquitous commercials are driving me insane.

Most of them are simply stupid, many are insulting my intelligence (such as the countless attempts to convince parents that sugar bombs are healthy for their children), but a couple are annoying to the point of causing physical pain.

The most painful ones, at the moment, are for probiotic yoghurt. They are ubiquitous, they are broadcast at painfully brief intervals, and some of them are strangely bizarre.

Like the one that starts with the voice-over announcing "mothers talk to their daughters about digestive problems", or the other one in which several women talk about how bloated they are all the time. I may not be able to fully understand this as I am a member of the male species, but it seems to be a somewhat unusual behaviour, and seeing women talking about digestive problems and being bloated in quick succession at 5-minute intervals minutes may fundamentally change my entire perception of women.