Found via No-sword, the original pictures used in the wug test.
I’ve linked to the Wikipedia article above, but the short version is that these pictures were used to test whether children can apply grammatical rules to nonsense words: can they correctly form a plural (or past tense, or whatever) of a word they’ve never heard before.
I mainly posted it because I find the pictures incredibly charming. You can download them here.
Larry has posted a whole compilation of train-themed soul music over at Funky16Corners, which seemed like as good a reason as any to post this video:
Trains are a big presence in American music, of course: blues, jazz, rock and roll all have their great train songs. I don’t think they’ve ever had quite the same associations in Europe, perhaps because our countries are just physically too small. There’s never been a great British road movie, either.
Still, there’s a different kind of romance to European train travel; the idea of buying a ticket in Paris and waking up the next morning in Vienna, or Milan, or Barcelona. Between school and university I went travelling around Europe by train with friends. That was before the Channel Tunnel, so it was a long first day: London-Dover, then the ferry, then a train to Paris, then walking across Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon to get a train heading south. But the next morning, I took one look out of the window and could see we were in Italy; the buildings, the whole look of the landscape, had changed.
Going by easyJet just isn’t the same.
Last week I went to ‘Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design‘ at the V&A. It explores the influence of Surrealist art on design, and demonstrates how quickly surrealist imagery was recycled as a design style; initially in very chic and expensive contexts and then in mass-market commercial design. And demonstrated in the process that it’s a very rare image that still manages to be startling, unsettling and generally unheimlich when used as curtain fabric.
That’s true even before the adoption of this imagery into the mainstream. One part of the exhibition was about the house of an art collector who was an early enthusiast of Surrealism. His house was painted purple; it had plaster shapes on the walls to look like sheets hanging out of the windows and huge model palm trees on either side of the door; he had the iconic Dali lobster telephones and Mae West Lips sofa, wolf pawprint carpets, and specially designed china, lamps and so on.
But if Surrealism is a radical exploration of the subconscious, dreams, sexuality and so on, what does it mean to fill a whole house with surreal objects? I suppose the collector might have claimed that the whole house was one Surrealist artwork, but it seems to me that once you’ve decided to use Surrealism as a interior design choice, you’ve already neutered it; it just becomes a set of visual tics.
Surrealism is always very vulnerable to that loss of power; like a lot of modern art, the moment the audience stops taking it seriously, it’s very hard to recapture the mystique. The most iconic, striking surrealist works—the lobster telephone, the fur-lined cup, some of those Magritte paintings—are also the most easily absorbed as likeable mainstream objects. You can enjoy them as visual jokes or intellectual puzzles and they are memorable and interesting; but without the unsettling, dangerous quality that I think Surrealism aspires to. There’s a very easy slippage from powerfully strange to amusingly quirky.