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Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Monday, December 16, 2013
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Saturday, September 28, 2013
September is Etymology Month (28)
ПЛОЩАДЬ [plóščad'] 'square'. OR 'square, street', from ChSl., based on Gk. plateia (hodós 'way' understood) 'street', lit. 'flat, broad way', alternatively from *ploskědь, cf. плоский 'flat', with -sk- palatalising to -šč- before -ě-, thus 'flat area'.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Thursday, August 01, 2013
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
I've just been to see Zero Dark Thirty, and although I don't usually write reviews of things I read or see or listen to, beyond saying 'I liked it' or, more rarely, 'I didn't like it', I feel somehow compelled to say that I liked this movie a great deal, and that the whole furore (ah, that's why I'm compelled to write about it! A good wholesome furore!) about whether or not it 'endorses torture', or suggests that torture was a useful tool in finding and killing Osama Bin Laden, doesn't seem to me to be the point of the movie. It's a film about knowledge, about how we process information, and the moral uncertainty that arises from this process. It's about how the world (in this instance the political world, the world of spycraft, but I think this applies to the world in general) is never purely black and white.
Three moments:
1. Maya (Jessica Chastain), the protagonist, says at one point something along the lines of: 'I've lost a lot of friends, I feel that I've been left behind to get Osama for them'. In the context of the movie, this kind of eschatological understanding of the mission is quite clearly naive: it may be (it's not entirely clear that it is) what Maya thinks, but we are never given any kind of (with apologies) Hollywood-style implied statement that she is right.
2. CIA chief James Gandolfini asks people round a table to say, yes or no, whether they think Osama Bin Laden is in the house that he may have been tracked down to. Only Maya says, unequivocally, yes; everyone else gives generally positive numbers between 60% and 80%. James Gandolfini is naturally a little put out by this.
3. When they finally get Bin Laden, they find his archives. 'Give me ten minutes to get it all bagged up,' the head of the squad says. 'You've got four before the Pakistani airforce get there,' his commanding officer tells him over the radio. They end up leaving half the archive there.
Unless you can tie up every loose end to every question in every situation, which, given the fact that life is messy, you can't, then solutions to particular problems (from 'Where is Osama Bin Laden?' to 'What Happened Last Night?') will always be a matter of reconstructing possible paths through disorganised chaos, and if you arrive at the 'right' answer, then you are lucky. Quid est veritas, as someone once said.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Carl Blechen (1798-1840)
Einfache Häuser an der Landstraße (Das Quartier der Soldaten in Pompeji) (1829). More information here.
Friday, January 04, 2013
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Elizabeth Price (1966- )
When I was last in London I went, almost without meaning to, to the Turner Prize exhibition. Elizabeth Price (more information here) was for me the most interesting artist on the shortlist by far, but this may be down to my weakness for cinema, my desire for the womblike darkness of the viewing room, and my love of clerestories.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Disconcerting Fictional Encounter of the Day
We neared our destination, The Trade Towers. Smoke still drifted near the base of the south tower, where the latest blast had occurred. Our operations were located in the north tower, as was Mister Dryden's downtown apartment. To the right of the towers, near the river's edge, stood the beginnings of the floodwall. When the possibility of the Green first showed itself, years ago, the city borrowed funds from the Old Man toward the construction of a fifty-foot wall intended to surround Manhattan. The funds were no less liquid than the waters to be fought and were mostly diverted to other campaigns. The floodwall ran only from the towers south to the Battery. Traditional American handicraft was employed in the wall's construction, and so most of it had collapsed.
Jack Womack, Ambient (1988)
Jack Womack, Ambient (1988)
Monday, April 02, 2012
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Antonio Galván Espárrago (1944- )
Our local bijou bookshop / winebar, Tipos Infames, has an exhibition on of drawings by this Badajoz-born artist, who is great.
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