A mineral with the same composition as Superman’s only natural weakness is on display in the Earth’s Treasury gallery at the London museum.

Jadarite, discovered in Serbia in 2006, is composed of sodium, lithium, boron silicate and hydroxide.

When NHM mineral expert Dr Chris Stanley found the specimen’s make-up didn’t match anything else known to science, he turned to the internet and typed in the combination of chemical elements.

“I was amazed to discover that same (list of elements) written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luthor from a museum in the film ‘Superman Returns’,” he says.

The only difference between Jadarite and Kryptonite is fluorine, which gives Kryptonite its green colour.

And, of course, Jadarite is not radioactive; although as yet its effects on superheroes from the planet Krypton have not been tested.

It is one thing to have images published in a magazine (which I have) or on an international media website (which I have), but to be hanging in a gallery is something else; something more prestigious.

I am quite proud and excited, to say the least.

Of course, I should really qualify the above by explaining that the exhibition I speak of isn’t all about my work, and strictly speaking my photograph (it is just one) isn’t ‘hanging’, rather ‘stuck’ to a wall together with 800 or so other photographers’ submissions.

The exhibition is called The Meal, and is the result of a world-wide collaborative art project run by the Art House Co-Op.

The Art House is a collective based in Williamsburg, New York, that focuses on the intersection of hands-on art making and new technology, harnessing the power of the virtual world (and a 60,000-strong community) to share inspiration in the real world.

The premise of The Meal project was to inspire a feeling of connection across geographic and cultural boundaries by sharing one meal at one moment in one photograph.

As well as sitting down to a simultaneous global snack at 12pm EST on February 24th 2012, participants were asked to support Action Against Hunger, or at least take a closer look at what the organisation does to help the nearly one billion people around the world for whom hunger is a constant daily reality.

For me in London, 12pm EST meant 5pm GMT, and a juggling of work breaks in order to fulfil the timeframe. And on the menu – tomato soup and a buttered bread roll.

On April 5th, as promised by the Art House Co-Op at the project’s outset, everyone who submitted a photograph before the deadline was included in an exhibition launched at their store-front space, the Brooklyn Art Library; me among them.

So, any and all technicalities aside, I am an exhibited photographer. Yaay me.

http://www.arthousecoop.com
http://www.actionagainsthunger.org

Images by Art House Co-Op and Amy Freeborn

The first new punctuation mark for 300 years, it enjoyed a short but dazzling period of success in the 1960s.

An interrobang is a combination of a question mark and exclamation point and derives its name from the Latin interrogatio, ‘a rhetorical question’, and the English ‘bang’, typographic and editorial industry slang for the exclamation point.

It was invented by Martin Speckter, a New York advertising executive and keen typographer (he was editor of the bimonthly journal ‘Type Talks’), and intended to capture the tone of a surprised or rhetorical question and do away with what Speckter called the “ugly construction” of using its two component characters.

Speckter introduced the interrobang in an article in the March-April 1962 edition of ‘Type Talks’, declaring that finally the world had a symbol which “clearly combines and melds interrogation with exclamation”.

He used the greeting ‘How do you do?’ as an example.

“We all know the other fellow really doesn’t want information with this salutation,” Speckter wrote.

“He’s trying to indicate a hearty interest in our well being. But if you write ‘How do you do!’ it makes him out a churl, a superficial type who doesn’t give a hang about the other chap.

“There’s where use of an interrobang could contribute nuance and clarity.”

Speckter’s innovation was soon picked up by the media at large, including The New York Herald Tribune which hailed it “true genius” in a column on April 1, and the Wall Street Journal which dedicated an editorial to it on April 6.

Martin Speckter with early interrobang designs. Image from the World-Herald, June 1967.

While the idea of the character was enthusiastically received, its application wasn’t quite so simple. On a typewriter one could type a ‘!’ then go back and overstrike it with a ‘?’, but typesetters didn’t have such flexibility and for use the symbol either had to be hand-drawn afterwards, or a new letter block specially made (a costly and time-consuming effort).

The interrobang got its proper breakthrough a handful of years later when graphic designer Richard Isbell included it in his new font, Americana.

The achievement was reported by Time magazine in an article in July 1967 – the interrobang was the first new symbol since the quotation mark in 1671 to enter the printed language.

In September 1968 Remington Rand, the typewriter manufacturer, announced that it would offer the interrobang as a special interchangeable key for its Model 25 electric typewriter. Smith-Corona followed suit in 1969.

In those final years of the ’60s the interrobang enjoyed widespread appreciation and media attention, including Newsweek and Life magazine features. Several press articles noted that “typographers are said to recommend (the interrobang) for its ability to express the incredibility of modern life”.

But sadly it was all short-lived.

While the general public embraced it, and the advertising industry enthusiastically deployed it, the interrobang’s stumbling block to real success and acceptance was the language purists who weren’t convinced of its necessity or its grammatical accuracy.

And alas, by the early 1970s the so-recently-celebrated interrobang had all but disappeared into obscurity.

It went virtually unnoticed when, in 1996, the interrobang was officially recognised in the 10th edition of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, listed under the definition for punctuation.

It was Keith Houston’s Shady Characters website articles of early 2011 that first introduced me to the interrobang (and I owe him a debt of gratitude for his thoroughly researched and heavily citated work, which has helped me put this piece together).

I had long been a user of (the “ugly construction” of) ‘?!’ at the end of sentences, so it was with joy that I learned about the existence of the interrobang and with fervour that I adopted it for use.

And suddenly, I discovered that this character, apparently forgotten for forty years, in fact enjoys a loyal – some might even say cult – following.

I learned that it is included in the Unicode computer character set, its name has been adopted by various businesses, bands and publications, and its symbol by the New South Wales state library and sell-it-yourself crafters (I bought a hand-made skirt printed with it). There are Facebook pages dedicated to it, and even a browser plug-in to make for easier insertion online.

One imagines that if Martin Speckter (who passed away in 1988) were alive today to mark the interrobang’s 50th birthday, he’d be self-satisfactorily thinking: ‘How about that ‽’

Pictures by Amy Freeborn

London – King’s College; 17 December 2011.

http://www.thebronxxx.com

Pictures by Amy Freeborn

And indeed it was on Twitter that I heard Tom Morello was going to play a gig at the Occupy movement’s London tent city outside St Paul’s cathedral on Wednesday (November 9) night.

I had been given a two-hour ‘early minute’ from work and as I was walking to the tube station to make my way home, browsing Twitter on my phone, I saw this post from Tom Morello: “Running well behind but WILL get to St. Pauls to occupy rock occupy rock occupy rock”.

Reasoning that if he was running late, I probably had enough time to make the 40-minute journey myself and get there in time to see him, that’s what I did.

There was a tense atmosphere in the city that evening. Not only was the Occupy LSX crew (much to the chagrin of the ‘establishment’) still camped out opposite the stock exchange at St Paul’s after more than three weeks, another protest group – students against tuition fee rises and benefit cuts – had marched that day, culminating at the cathedral.

On the streets there was police everywhere – cordons set up manned by four or five men a-piece, van loads of constabulary parked up and down the roads, and horses clip-clopping through one of the world’s leading financial districts.

It was a strange sight indeed.

Tom Morello, the politically-active Rage Against the Machine guitarist and ‘one-man revolutionary’ behind The Nightwatchman, has been an ever-present fixture at protests and union struggles for years in the US. Providing a soundtrack for such events was part of the raison d’etre for creating his alter-ego The Nightwatchman in the first place.

Since the Occupy movement – a worldwide protest against social and financial inequality – rose to public prominence on Wall Street in New York in mid-September, Morello has visited eight of its camps across America (New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco), Canada (Vancouver) and the UK (Birmingham, Newcastle and now London).

Given that he had a gig at London’s Brixton Academy that evening, and with the additional objectors on the streets for the student march, it was not entirely unexpected that Morello might come down to tent city and play a few songs for those who had come out to stand up for what they believed in.

And around 5.30pm that’s what he did. And thankfully I had made it in time to see it.

Outside the Occupy LSX kitchen tent, Morello declared: “It is an honour to be at Occupy London with you today.”

Starting each sentence with “mic check”, the crowd responded by shouting back everything that he said, passing on Morello’s messages to those not close enough to hear firsthand, and helping alleviate the sporadically overpowering sound of the police helicopters flying overhead.

“The people that own and control this world don’t deserve to,” Morello said.

“I have a message for them: the beginning is here.”

Quoting from ‘Black Spartacus Heart Attack Machine’, the opening track of his fourth solo album, ‘World Wide Rebel Songs’, he continued:

“Because history’s not made by presidents or popes, or kings or queens or generals, or CIA kingpins running dope. History’s not made by nine robed men, or billionaires or bankers; it’s not made by them. They might throw a little money around, wondering who can be bought. Some might find they’re cheaper, some might find they’re stronger than they thought. But we’ll stand right here, in our country, in our home. I used to think that I was alone; I ain’t alone no more.”

He played three songs – ‘Flesh Shapes The Day’, Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Guerrilla Radio’ (which you can see below), and ‘World Wide Rebel Song’.

Interviewed after the impromptu gig, Morello said: “The lesson that the Arab Spring taught the world was that in order to change the world all you have to do is walk out your front door and just do it.

“People are realising… young people that’ve never been to a protest or demonstration ever, are coming out in their tens of thousands and they realise that they have their hand on the wheel of history and they are trying to turn it in a better direction.”

He continued: “I’m here playing because I believe in this. In my country, there’s never been a successful, progressive struggle for social justice that hasn’t had a good soundtrack, so I do my best to provide what I can.

“What (music) does is it puts wind in the sails of a struggle, and there’s something that speaks truth to the reptilian brain in people about the combination of melody and rhythm and rhyme.”

http://nightwatchmanmusic.com

Picture and video by Amy Freeborn

But when police arrived to disperse the reportedly peaceful gathering, some members of the crowed turned violent, and sparked what would lead to (at current count) four days of rioting, vandalism, looting and arson across all points of London, and around the country.

Police and their vehicles have been attacked, retail stores – from grocery to clothing to electrical – smashed and looted, and commercial and residential properties destroyed by fire.

Events in Tottenham were rekindled on Sunday, and spread to Enfield, Islington and Oxford Circus. By the early hours of Monday, mobs had erupted in Walthamstow and Brixton. On Monday evening a new front formed in Hackney, with further outbreaks in Croydon, Clapham, Ealing and Enfield.

A furniture store in Croydon established in 1867 and run by five generations of the same family was burnt to the ground, while a warehouse blaze in Enfield destroyed the stock of many of the UK’s favourite independent record labels.

Meanwhile, copycat violence and destruction broke out in Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool.

The genesis of the events was a call for justice for the Duggan family, but it evolved into an on-going series of senseless vandalism and theft, and various commentators have pondered why so many young people have been so willing to take to the streets purely to smash and grab.

While there can be no excuse for this behaviour, certain issues cannot be ignored: Young people today find themselves in the historically rare situation of having fewer prospects than the generation before them.

Couple that with a Government that has invested little in their interests – see: cuts to local services including youth centres, cuts to Sure Start and the Educational Maintenance Allowance, and a rise in tertiary tuition fees – and the result is a section of youth with no stake in society.

Without a sense of social or community solidarity, they have no respect for it, or the consequences of their actions; they feel they have nothing more to lose.

Prime Minister David Cameron cut his summer holiday short in order to return to the UK this morning to deal with the unrest, as did London Mayor Boris Johnson.

And while leaders and the authorities met and pledged to draft an additional 10,000 police officers to patrol the city tonight, the residents in areas affected by the events of the nights before came together to reclaim their streets.

Rallied by a group set up on social networks, Riot Clean Up, many more than had perpetrated the damage turned out to clean it up. Images spread online of crowds of helpers with brooms aloft, in a heartwarming display of community strength and cohesion.

At 5pm today Scotland Yard confirmed that 563 people had been arrested and 105 charged, and 111 officers and 5 dogs injured, in London since violence broke out on Saturday.

Also confirmed this evening was the finding of the Independent Police Complaints Commission that Mark Duggan did not shoot a gun at police.

Tonight, London is unusually quiet. Many shops closed early this evening and others boarded their windows in an effort to avoid damage, but so far there have been only minor disturbances in Canning Town. Elsewhere citizens were taking to the street in several areas to patrol and protect their neighbourhoods.

But outside the capital, major incidents of property damage and theft are ongoing tonight in Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool, and a police station in Nottingham has been fire-bombed.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

My account:

I live about one mile down the road from where the most intense action took place in Hackney on Monday night.

And while the evening was filled with the constant distant sound of sirens and the buzz of helicopters flying overhead, I remained calm and confident of my safety.

After all, the driving propensity of the rioters seemed to be looting – my house is in a residential area and the few shops nearby aren’t worth targeting.

But what I hadn’t taken into consideration was mob mentality – evident in the way the initial rioting had sporadically spread from one north London location, to handfuls of disconnected locations across the capital, and later, the country – and the idleness of youth.

And so it was, around midnight on August 8th, that the smell of smoke began to waft in through my kitchen window.

Outside, the skeleton of a building on a construction site across the road was on fire.

My first assumption was that it was started by one, or a group, of the local hoodlums who congregate on the street corners all hours of the day and night, with nothing better to do than roughhouse with, and yell at, each other. It might have been one of the boys I had seen earlier in the night, yelling towards the sky at the police helicopters flying over: “fuck you, pigs”.

While the fire was by no means a riot situation, it had clearly been inspired by the various pockets of violence, looting and arson which were sweeping not only the capital, but the whole country.

Remarkably, given the amount of unrest that night, the local fire brigade arrived in minutes and extinguished the blaze without any incident.

The home-owner in me was glad the fire didn’t spread, but the journalist in me secretly wished for more action; the clothes on me smelt of smoke.

Picture by Amy Freeborn

After all, I remember reading the 2009 story about eBay-er Morace Park who bought a battered old film tin for £3.20 – because “it had a lovely look to it” – and ended up with a never-before-seen Charlie Chaplin film that was later valued at £40,000.

The item description read:

‘Do you like a gamble? Answer yes and read on… What we have here is a roll of unprocessed film. It’s still in its original plastic tube and has laid unseen for the past thirty years. Like opening the Holy Grail, you have the opportunity to view what pictures have been caught on film. Worth a gamble… we’ll let you decide.’

And I thought, yes, I’ll take that gamble.

Once I’d confirmed my purchase, a real excitement began to build as I contemplated what may lie within.

While I was realistic enough to know that I probably wasn’t going to discover a photographic treasure worth tens of thousands of pounds, like Mr Park had, I hoped at least that I would find an interesting range of images that would make a good subject for this article, and that they’d have that currently-desirable vintage look to make for a pretty pictorial accompaniment to my words.

I was reasonably confident that it would yield something other than trash.

The film arrived in the post on Tuesday, four days after my purchase, and I immediately walked down the high street and put it in for processing.

The man at Snappy Snaps commented on the silver-ended roll: “I haven’t seen one of these for a long time”, and asked me how old it was.

I told him it was apparently 30-years-old and that I’d bought it on eBay as a bit of an experimental documentary project. I instructed him that even if the images appeared tainted, damaged or otherwise worthless at first glance, that I wanted them all put onto the disc anyway.

He tore off the little strip at the top of the envelope, handed it to me, and told me to come back after 12 o’clock to pick up the results.

That was an hour and a half away, so I returned to my office and fired off an email to the seller, who I shall name only as Eileen:

“I was just wondering if you are able to give me any background details on the film at all, ie: where did you get it? who did it belong to? how do you know it’s 30 years old? etc. I bought the film as a sort of documentary project, as I am a writer and photographer, so any background information you could provide on the film itself would be very helpful.”

The hour of noon came, and I trotted back to Snappy Snaps to pick up my disc and the contact sheet of images. The man who had served me earlier did not make any comment on the results; he just took my money and handed over the envelope.

As I walked back up the road to my office I couldn’t wait, and sneaked a peek at the contact sheet.

And what did I see? A series of amateur soft-porn shots of a blonde woman wearing only black high heels, occasionally using a chair as a prop.

I shut the envelope in an almost embarrassed fashion, as if passers-by might be able to see what I was looking at (they couldn’t, of course).

I suppose it didn’t really come as a total surprise – I had had a fleeting thought prior to the film’s arrival that porn was a possibility.

At least they had a retro, expired film, light-leak look to them, I reasoned with myself.

As I walked the rest of the way back to the office I wondered who the woman in these pictures could be.

Was it possible that Eileen was an exhibitionist and had bought on old, unused roll of film, shot these images of herself, and listed it under the aforementioned pretence?

A look at her other eBay items revealed a host of slides and vintage photographic paraphernalia and accoutrements, but nothing to reveal any kind of kinky side.

Then, about six hours after I had sent my email to her, Eileen, from East Sussex, replied, saying:

“I really wish I could help you more but all I know is that I bought the films and other goods from someone who found them in a loft. All he knew was that the films must have been stored away for at least 30 years. He had no idea who they belonged to, or anything else. Sorry I can’t help.”

I responded saying that she might be interested and/or amused to know that the film contained pornography; she was shocked and apologised profusely.

I said it was fine; the item description had clearly stated that it was a gamble, after all.

So, while this project of chance didn’t turn out as I had expected, I did at least get this story out of it; and as they say – one woman’s trash is another man’s treasure (or pleasure, as the case may be).

]]> http://www.thefreeborntimes.com/archives/1642/feed 0 http://www.thefreeborntimes.com/archives/1519 http://www.thefreeborntimes.com/archives/1519#comments Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:41:32 +0000 Amy Freeborn http://www.thefreeborntimes.com/?p=1519 On a trip to Santa Cruz, California, in the summer of 2007 a 12-year-old girl from Texas dropped her digital camera off the pier.

But where this story really begins is almost four years later and six miles away following two particularly stormy days in March.

Peter Govaars and his daughter were beachcombing at Hidden Beach in Aptos, (340 miles north-west of Los Angeles), examining the debris washed ashore, when Peter noticed the skeleton of a camera under his feet with, remarkably, its memory card still attached.

With his father’s tinkering spirit in mind and his grandfather’s adage (translated from Dutch) of “you have ‘no’, you can always try for ‘yes’”, he decided to take the SD card home and see if the pictures could be recovered.

After a little care, and with the help of a craft knife, and some rubbing alcohol, Peter removed the chip from its plastic housing, cleaned off the corrosion and green slime, put it all back together and inserted the card into his computer.

“Lo and behold – the card appeared on my desktop and was readable,” Peter recalls.

The modern-day message in a bottle had, against all odds, given up its secrets after four years lost at sea.

“At that point the experience went from technical to emotional. I was excited that these lost photos were viewable, and immediately started to wonder about the people in the pictures.”

What he had discovered, and recovered, was around 100 images taken over a two-week period in June 2007. They featured a child’s birthday party, a Burger King meal, a trip to the beach, and finally, the Santa Cruz pier, where the camera’s owner had presumed her photographic memories lost forever.

In fact, the last photo on the card was a side-ways shot of a sea lion in the water – perhaps snapped just moments before the camera was dropped and began its remarkable journey.

Having come this far, Peter decided to try and reunite images and owner.

He set up a Flicker set featuring a handful of the images under the name ‘DoYouKnowUs’ and about a month ago sent an email to the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper. A reporter interviewed him on June 14th, and the story was published online on June 19th and in print on June 20th.

Then “everything just spread like wild-fire”, he says.

The story was picked up everywhere from New York, to the UK, to Brazil.

Amongst Flickr messages “blessing” Peter and his “good deed”, was a group of followers who took on the role of amateur investigative journalists.

“A small group of people took a strong interest in the story and each contributed a bit to solving the puzzle. My thanks go out to all of them,” Peter says.

“A few people were able to look up a name and address from a license plate in one of the photos. Another found the phone number for the name/address, but found it was disconnected.”

Then US news and entertainment program Inside Edition caught wind of the story, “did some magic and got in touch with the family in Texas by phone”.

“At roughly the same time, one of the owner’s cousins contacted me via email because she saw the story on a Bay Area news website,” he says.

In just a fraction of the time that the camera had been lost, its owner had been found, and the mystery solved.

“There was roughly a week of background work to put the initial story together, and then around two days for it to go viral and the crowd-sourced investigation to find the owner.

“The power of the internet is phenomenal. You can see it with this story, but more importantly in the reporting from places like Egypt, Syria, and Libya. Although this is not an earth-shattering event, this story was able to resonate with people, and it got picked up around the world in only two days time,” Peter says.

While he has yet to speak to the camera’s owner or her family, he has spoken on the phone with the owner’s cousin, who made contact through Flickr.

“She said her cousin that lost the camera was giddy about suddenly being famous, and was telling all her friends about it on Facebook.”

Peter says there is talk of Inside Edition arranging for the owner (who appears at the front in the above image) and her family to fly out for a TV reunion, “which looks like it may actually happen”.

Reflecting on the flurry of attention his story has brought this week, Peter said yesterday:

“I’m glad to get the card back to her. It’s a story she’ll be able to think back fondly about for the rest of her life. I know that when I go back through my own family photos, the pictures remind me of great stories about the times and places the pictures were taken. And that’s not even for pictures that were lost at sea for four years! I hope the same will be true for her, along with the follow-on story of all the media attention that surrounded it.”

Pictures courtesy of Peter Govaars and the camera’s owner

Graffiti icon Banksy has created a new piece in London – a tribute to the ubiquitous tagger and recently criminal damage-convicted, Tox.

At Tox’s trial on June 6th, prosecutor Hugo Lodge told the jury: “He is no Banksy. He doesn’t have the artistic skills”, and he was subsequently found guilty on seven counts.

But while Tox has been dismissed by the police and legal establishment as a vandal, Banksy’s work – which has sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds – is considered artistic and culturally significant.

So much so, that tonight, just a day after the piece appeared on Jeffrey’s Street in Tox’s hometown of Camden, three workmen were busy fitting the frame for a perspex encasement to protect it from damage or theft.

The image features a young boy, whose identity is concealed with a black bar over his eyes, creating the word ‘Tox’ with a bubble wand.

It is quintessentially Banksy, while giving a nod to the practice of tagging through its bubble writing-style.

Tox – real name Daniel Halpin, 26-years-old – was arrested and remanded at the beginning of the year as part of the British Transport Police’s ‘Operation Misfit’ to crack down on graffiti, and remains in custody awaiting sentencing on July 1st.

He has been acclaimed the ‘King of Taggers’ by his peers for his dedication to spraying his tag on more, and riskier, places than any other in the UK.

The Camden piece is a fitting display of solidarity and support from Banksy; and a raised middle finger to the authorities.

Pictures by Amy Freeborn