Voltaire
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
A Few More Stills
100 Best First Lines from Novels
1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
Bush Scraps Address for Oprah
Tonight Bush scraps State of Union Address to appear on Oprah. Fresh from a public shaming of author James Frey for his memoir of lies, Oprah agreed to interview President George W. Bush about his feelings on the State of his Union.
Oprah is expected to Frey him where he sits, in a big comfortable beige chair/sofa thing on the Oprah set. If all goes as planned, Oprah will publicly shame the President for his lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about the beneficiaries of his tax cuts, about the disasters of the recent year, and about his past alcoholism.
In front of a news media stunned by this development, White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan assured them that “the President is fully on board with this. He never liked big-government elitist stunts like Union addresses anyway. He’s a Texan. He’s the people. And Oprah knows the people. And he’s going to talk to the people through Oprah. Bush to Oprah to People. It’s gonna work.”
[Continued here.]
Sidewalk art by Julian Beever
See some amazing works in chalk here:
http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm
Shoe Hat
Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) collaborated with a number of Surrealist artists, including Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Alberto Giacometti. She translated many of Surrealism’s precepts into imaginative and often provocative designs.
Shoe Hat, (collaboration with Salvador Dalí), winter 1937-38. Black wool felt.
Shopping in 1975
From Marginal Revolution:
Other than the style differences, the fact most noticeable from the contents of this catalog’s 1,491 pages is what the catalog doesn’t contain. The Sears customer in 1975 found no CD players for either home or car; no DVD or VHS players; no cell phones; no televisions with remote controls or flat-screens; no personal computers or video games; no food processors; no digital cameras or camcorders; no spandex clothing; no down comforters (only comforters filled with polyester).
The Brave and The Bold
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie has a new album with Tortoise:
Songs covered here include Elton John’s Daniel, Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road, Milton Nascimento’s Cravo e Canela, Melanie’s (Some Say) I Got Devil and Devo’s That’s Pep. Plus tunes by Richard Thompson, Don Williams, Minutemen, Quix’o'tic – if there’s someone out there who can say it’s not an intriguing track-list, I’d love to know what they’re listening to. But it’s more than a curiosity. The best covers are the ones given both respect and new interpretations: Thunder Road, with its slow melody and non-pompous production, is particularly haunting. The Elton John and Richard Thompson songs, though more faithful, get a spooky desperation from Oldham’s bony, dolorous voice, while Melanie’s melodramatic folk becomes a stoic song of sin and redemption. Weak points are the Nascimento and Devo covers – the first sounds like soulless Santana, the second just sounds naff – but there are enough moments of complex, nuanced, lingering beauty here to keep drawing you back.
New Jane Unrue at 5 Trope
“Look down on snaky patterns set into the pathways leading to the chapel, ivory cross on top. That sad though cunning structure. Dimly looming building fashioned out of midnight, moonlight glittering its lines and contours, stars reflected in the stained-glass windows. Passion. Resurrection. Others may walk by, but you won’t see their faces; they will not see yours.” Continue Reading…
“Palace Revolt”
This important article in Newsweek reveals much about who has been behind the overarching claims of presidential power in the execution of a war and about those career officials who have fought back.
In case you missed it. . . .
A spot of humor. Scroll down to Frank Caliendo and click on the video.
Fine Books & Collections
Book collectors who lamented the death of Biblio a few years ago might want to take a look at Fine Books & Collections, a copy of which I just stumbled across at Barnes and Noble. There are articles about the British Library; Durrant Editions’ republication of David Copperfield as it was serialized, 19th century ads and all; and Moving Parts Press. The magazine’s website is here.
Crown Hall
From Coudal Partners:
On Saturday, August 27th, the Illinois Institute of Technology unveiled the newly renovated, more beautiful than ever, S.R. Crown Hall. The masterpiece of a building was designed by Mies van der Rohe in the early 1950’s and finished construction in 1956. Described by Time Magazine as “the world’s most influential, inspiring and astonishing structures” Crown Hall is a breathtaking, free space; intimidating with its jet black, sharp lines, while entirely inviting and open with its gigantic windows. A visit to the IIT campus always feels like a trip into the a perfect future, but never more so than in the newly shiny Crown Hall.
(The website has a video of the building as well.)
These Are Real
From Metropolis:
It’s often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs are real. They look uncannily like hyperdetailed models, absent the imperfections of reality. Streets are strangely clean, trees look plastic, and odd distortions of scale create the opposite effect of what we expect from aerial photography–a complete overview, like military surveillance. “I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything,” Barbieri says. “After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again.”
This Longing
I want my coffee to mean something.
Pascal’s Pensees
Some wise words by Pascal, accompanied by hard-hitting bebop sounds: http://www.ulaydesign.com/pensees/
fragment
Later, we use the knife to cut off our tails, which are four feet long.
Post Office
There’s this thing I do where I swallow letters, then I swallow stamps, then I pull them out and all the letters are stamped.
Stanley Kubrick: Barry Lyndon
Some stills from Barry Lyndon:
Steven Holl Connects Old with New
From Metropolis:
On the front and rear facades, at each point where a ramp begins or ends, a clear window is set into the otherwise translucent surface. The front facade–an abstract composition, with some of the red-painted frames continuing beyond the windows–is a projection of the dissonance inside the building, according to Holl. Because even the “solid” parts are made of structural channel glass, the entire wall glows at night. At the same time the dark brick bookends disappear so that Holl’s link, set back from the street, jumps out. What is background by day is foreground by night, and vice versa–old and new alternate in the starring role.
Natalia Ilyin Fights with Modernism
From Metropolis:
“Modernism–the guts of it, the strength of it, the egotistic beauty of it–carries with it effects we did not expect, and fosters attitudes about ourselves and others that may have been dandy in a utopia but do little good in our world,” writes Natalia Ilyin in Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time, recently released by Metropolis Books.
Winter Blues?
Now seems like a good time for a small dose of summer. Check out www.ropeswingmanifesto.com for a field guide to rope swings and swimming holes, complete with maps, photos, and descriptions. You can read the Manifesto for practical how-to advice and other good information, and you can post details about your own favorite swings.
An Interview with Renzo Piano
From Archinect:
Every scheme is a new adventure even if you make another museum…that is the reason why you have to be careful not to become self referential—instead of listening to the new place and the new voices you keep promoting your own kind of ego. I don’t want to be moralist, but when this happens it is not just bad for architects, it’s bad for everybody…So the real risk is that as an architect you end up imposing your stamp before you understand what is the reality of a place. I never take a new job without visiting the place, without trying to understand, without trying to get a basic, fundamental emotion…that truth is the real source of inspiration and if you close yourself in your little gold cage you end up becoming repetitive.
Portable Light
Secrets of Married Men
From Marginal Revolution:
Scott Haltzman, a psychiatrist and Brown University professor, has been studying marriages good and bad for a long time, both in his clinical work and via his web site. His new book, "The Secrets of Happily Married Men" collects what he says are the guy behaviors that lead to happy marriage…
Haltzman believes conventional marital therapy often tries to make men more like women — you know, getting in touch with their feelings, talking about their feelings, feeling their wives’ feelings, etc. But this approach is doomed to failure, he says, largely because men and women are equipped with such different hardware from the neck up…
Use the male habits and male skills that serve him well at work, at play, in competition, in the field and in other venues where he thrives. View marriage as your most important task, Haltzman urges men, and pursue success as you would anything else that matters. The assumption is it’s a lot more pleasant, and the payoffs far greater, to live with a woman who is satisfied, secure and feeling loved compared to one who is none of the above. Make this your job, he says.