June 2009
28 posts
pleasebequietplease:
In published compilations of their materials, numerous historical figures have left behind doodles. Erasmus drew comical faces in the margins of his manuscriptsand John Keats drew flowers in his medical note-books during lectures. Ralph Waldo Emerson, as a student at Harvard, decorated his composition books with somber, classical doodles, such as ornamental scrolls. In one...
Failure, Change, Adaptation
“The first inhabitants of Brasilia’s superquadras simply rejected the anti-street because it contradicted social practice. Constituting a cross-section of the bureaucracy, these settlers were predominantly from the urban Brazil, where the street is the focus of public activity. As people accustomed to the bustle of the street, they quickly grasped and repudiated the radical intentions...
Marginal
A convincing fictional world depends as much upon its cast of extras as it does upon its central characters.
The films of Michael Haneke document, amongst other things, what happens when the parallel lines of social stratification converge. During the opening minutes of his movie Code Unknown the camera pans back and forth, in one continuous shot, along 3 city blocks. A delivery truck emblazoned...
“The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many...”
– By Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty
The Guardian, Monday 15 June 2009 20.00 BST
Smite one chicken... →
Medieval English cookery book “The Forme of Cury” goes online, recipes include oven roast porpoise, how to best smite a chicken, and Bukkenade, which sounds like it would be something Japanese people do in their bedrooms.
The Truth
“Their devotion to art and artists produces in these people an inexpressible mawkishness; it is distressing to have to do with them and to talk to them; they are perfect logs smeared with honey. They never, for instance, call Raphael, Raphael, or Correggio, Correggio; “the divine Sanzio, the incomparable Allegri,” they murmur, and always with the broadest vowels. Every...
Discovery
In Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild, the character York, played by Leslie Cheung, travels to the Phillippines in order to find his biological mother. At the aristocratic mansion in which she resides he is turned away at the door by a maid. As he walks away he refuses to look back, so that his biological mother does not get the satisfaction of seeing her son’s face.
Days of Being...
Twitter Revolution
Rayner Banham said that in order to read the landscape of Los Angeles he learned to drive. The implication of this, of course, is that anyone who is incapable of driving (poor, young, old), or who wishes not to drive, is rendered illiterate, incapable not only of reading the landscape but of authoring, of influencing and creating the world around them.
Similarly, talk of the Twitter Revolution...
tumblotron
lostcosmonaut:
christopher, don’t you think it is a bit bleak to be posting this on tumblr, where we are almost nothing but “informational bits”
vogdoid:
“Writing in 1974, he posited a trenchant diagnosis of postwar Japan, describing the country as a ‘cyclotron,’ in which ‘everything is revolving in an extremely rapid cyclone of information. Here, humans themselves become informational bits....
trompe-l'œil
Portrait of a Carthusian, Petrus Christus, 1446
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“It is said that when Giotto was only a boy with Cimabue, he once painted a fly on the nose of a face that Cimabue had drawn, so naturally that the master returning to his work tried more than once to drive it away with his hand, thinking it was real. And I might tell you of many other jests played by Giotto, but of this enough.”
...
Intramuros
Each citizen of the city lives in a city of bespoke dimensions.
Kevin Lynch outlined how the inhabitants of places like Boston and suburban New Jersey identified, interacted and navigated around their immediate urban environments, through sets of abstract signs or by recognising tangible landmarks. Each individual’s mental place map was unique - recognisable features for the soccer mom...
Fidelity is...
Dancing while stood on your dog. Apparently.
Wonder what she’s listening to.
Fidelity, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, 1485
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
Next
After Conrad failed to kill himself by firing a gun into his chest in a dingy apartment in Marseille he moved to Lowestoft and worked on boats shipping coal.
When Novalis’ 15-year old fiancee Sophie died he moved to Freiburg and ran a Salt Mine.
Only after seeing Caspar David Freidrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog did Schinkel admit that he would never attain such mastery...
Dinosaurs
Jurassic Park
“All that we believed over and done, left behind by the inexorable march of universal progress, is not dead at all; it seems to be returning to strike at the heart of our ultrasophisticated, ultravulnerable systems. It’s a bit like the last scene of Jurassic Park, in which the modern (artifically cloned) dinosaurs burst into the museum and wreck havoc on their...
