Scrapping Richard Meier

Rome mayor aims to tear down Richard Meier museum

Alemanno, who this week became the first right-wing politician elected Rome mayor since Mussolini’s time, is among those critics who thought the classical Ara Pacis should never have been housed in such a modern structure.

One critic compared it to a giant petrol station, while another called it “an indecent cesspit”, when it was unveiled in 2006.

Alemanno, who ran on a security platform targeting illegal immigrants, said the Ara Pacis was not the only architectural project by his left-leaning predecessors he planned to review.

“We’re committed to looking at the constructions carried out in the historic centre, but the top emergencies are others,” he said.

Now, in general new architecture gets pilloried unfairly from time to time, and when I first read this article, familiar with the architect but neither the structure nor the mayor, the familiar hackles rose to defend the artiste against the philistines and then I took a look at the structure. Have you seen this thing? And to place this 70s sort of coffee table architecture into sublime classical Rome? It looks like a typical high school. I just might fly down there and help out. Here it is.

All over the map: the Monday collection

Solar Eclipse at the Antarctic

Jument Lighthouse in France from DeputyDog’s Collection of Lighthouses

Casa Battio Staircase from OObject’s Collection of Spiral Staircases

I’ll be in Barcelona in a few days, and may in fact, ascend this wonder.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous: from EarthTimes the Japanese Boob Pudding

The package:

Opened:

From the land of intricate etiquette, cherry blossoms, budo, living treasures, sand gardens and ikebana. Of course.

Gordon Ramsay, Ricky Gervais, African Cats and Nescafe

An Unlikely Way to Save a Species: Serve It for Dinner

The headline is slightly misleading in that the eater approach to conservation works better for plants than for small animal populations but overall worth considering. Strange to think that if left alone, many of these species will die out. Of course, on an existential note, what does it mean to be only because you are edible.

Gordon Ramsay and James May eating bull’s penis and rotting shark and then cooking…

And now Gordon Ramsay and Ricky Gervais

And from DetectivesBeyondBorders a coffee discussion:

From Timothy Hallinan’s Thailand-set novel A Nail Through the Heart

“Twenty or so years ago, in one of the first invasions by a Western brand name, Nescafé shouldered aside the much more labor-intensive processes by which the Thais made some of the world’s best coffee, replacing taste with convenience.”
“But Rose [who is Thai] grew up with Nescafé. She adores it, hot, tepid or iced. He has seen her eat a teaspoon of it, dry. … [Rafferty] takes a sip, rolls it around in his mouth like red wine, and revises his opinion. It’s an interesting drink if you don’t insist that it’s coffee.”

I suppose that might work..I do remember when down in Mexico and then later in other coffee growing lands being puzzled about the ubiquity of Nescafe.

African Food - Mystery Meals

This wonderful little gem from someone who is not entirely up on the current (or is it just North American) slang.

Cats and Dogs - One man’s pet is another man’s meal. Ghana’s Volta Region is the place to eat pussy (tastes like chicken) In Nigeria dog meat which is roasted like beef is also belived to improve your sex life.

Mostly the New York Times

Good weekend reading over at the NYT

1. A City Where You Can’t Hear Yourself Scream

This is not like London or New York, or even Tehran, another car-clogged Middle Eastern capital. It is literally like living day in and day out with a lawn mower running next to your head, according to scientists with the National Research Center. They spent five years studying noise levels across the city and concluded in a report issued this year that the average noise from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. is 85 decibels, a bit louder than a freight train 15 feet away, said Mustafa el Sayyid, an engineer who helped carry out the study.

But that 85 decibels, while “clearly unacceptable,” is only the average across the day and across the city. At other locations, it is far worse, he said. In Tahrir Square, or Ramsis Square, or the road leading to the pyramids, the noise often reaches 95 decibels, he said, which is only slightly quieter than standing next to a jackhammer.

I was thinking of one brother who spent a very strange year in Egypt and then another who reported back from his trip in South Asia that a typical Thai restaurant had to have a full volume blaring televlsion set that no one paid any attention to. This was particularly galling to him in that, though he shares my distaste for urban noise and especially horrid music in commercial or public areas, he is so indisposed by this that he finds he can only feel calm living in the mountains. And that is where he has been for years, apart from the near annual trip over the ocean to somewhere.

2. Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

About a Nokia user-anthropologist who travels the world looking for innovative design solutions based on how people actually do things, and see how they use products in unintended ways (naturally focussing on cellphones). Like this but took exception to the statement, which might be true, but kind of sad, that “in an increasingly transient world the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.” This too reminded me of my first mentioned brother’s reports from Egypt, and later Korea, about the cellphone madness in other lands where people obsessed about which model they had, and the topic of conversation was usually the phone itself. Come to think of it, we’re kind of going that way.

In this respect I remain actively Luddite and only when I am dead, or cells actually do become cheaper in which case it will stay in my house almost always, will they pry the landline from me. I have railed before and will again about the tyranny of technology. How it drops ever more filters between us and the life around us, how it fools us into thinking we are more important than the world, that we are the center because we can carry everything with us. I try to limit my labour saving devices, and my access to certain things so that I do go without sometimes, just so that something unexpected might happen. I don’t like a scheduled life and the cell phone is a step in that direction.

Starting a new blog

Hey folks, for those of you who care, and few though you may be, I thought it worth a notice. I have decided to launch a new blog, one about the structures in my “fair” city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I am still crafting my monumental introductory post but the essence is this: all cities are composed of good and bad buildings and not too much is said about these things that we must pass by every day. My city is more bad than good, and the certainty of that comes from travel, from seeing alternative and much more interesting and pleasing solutions to that basic need of putting a roof over your head. But though I live in dross for the most part, I will try to laud as much as brickbat; I will do my best to praise what I can. And partly because I would like to see more of it.

Though much of it will be based on my pedestrian photographs of local sites, I will go afield as well partly so I can compare, and just to keep the blog a little varied. I will be asking for people to send in photos of buildings they love or hate, and I hope we get some provocative discussion going..after all we have to live with this stuff, might as well think about it too. And if someone sends me an image of a cool or not so cool building in Kuala Lumpor or Portland or Naiorobi, we’ll play with that.

Anyway, once its on its way, I will let you know, and though I will try to do a daily or bi-daily post, I do work full time so its not a promise, and I have to keep this one (and a couple of others) going as well.

TravelPage

Barcelona 2007

Barcelona airport
Barcelona: part 1
Barcelona: part 2
Barcelona: part 3
Barcelona: part 4

Madrid 2007

Iberian porkland; or Spain, land o ham
Madrid: day 1
Madrid: day 2: part 1: the Prado
Madrid: day 2: part 2: the Prado
Madrid: day 2: part 3: the Prado
Madrid: day 3: part 1
Madrid: day 4
Madrid: day 5: Avila, Segovia
Madrid: day 6

Ottawa 2008

Ottawa thoughts

Prague 2007

Collage
Prague: day 1
Prague: day 2: part 1
Prague: day 2: part 2
Prague: day 3: part 1
Prague: day 3: part 2
Prague: day 4: part 1
Prague: day 4: part 2
Prague: day 4: part 3

Toronto 2006

Toronto

Warsaw 2007

Warsaw: day 1, part 1
Warsaw: day 1, part 2
Warsaw: day 2
Warsaw: day 3
Warsaw: day 4, part 1
Warsaw: day 4, part 2
Two more Warsaw pictures

In General:

4 memes, 4 sooth, 4 play

Considering the source (Warsaw, Barcelona)

We are ugly but we have the music

Castanets Exclusive: Saltspring Island

Frank sent me three photographs. I will be posting one a week. This is called Saltspring Island. He’s spent time there; its one of the Gulf Islands on the Canadian West Coast just off Vancouver Island. I love how he blurs the line between photography and painting.

For more of his photography go to frankgrisdale.com.

The genre blurring ties in with a photograph I have hanging in my bedroom by someone else, taken in Europe. The picture is of an older woman from the neck down with a bag slung from her hand, and it looks like a cross between Matisse and Gauguin. When I asked him how he managed it, he told me that he simply covered the lens with a nylon stocking which gave the picture texture. I’m sure he did a little more in the darkroom as well.

I’m not sure exactly why this element of artifice, this miming of painting, strengthens the image. Is it that it conveys solidity, the image is taken from the impermanence of everyday experience and shifted toward stasis, its very muddying somehow elevating it?

Books, happiness, learning Spanish, and bad haircuts

Forgive the long post and paucity of images…wordpress is gone all wonky for me lately, first not letting me access any wordpress blog, then just some, and then finally all but not letting me upload any images. I am temporarily back in control. (Weekends off for the wordpress folks?)

1. Bathe her and bring her to me.

One of many helpful phrases thanks to GrowaBrain..

¿Dondé está el baño?
Where is the bathroom?

Tu hija es muy bonita.
Your daughter is very beautiful.

¿Cuanto cuesta esa cosa?
How much does that thing cost?

Tú eres un pendejo chingado.
You are not a very nice person.

Tengo una caja roja de las lapices.
I have a red pencil box.

Me gusta tu cabeza y tu estamago.
I like your head and your stomach.

¿Cinco doláres? ¿Por esa cosa?
Five dollars? For that thing?

No comas esa. No sabes donde esa ha pasado.
Don’t eat that. You don’t know where it has been.

Lavase, y conduce a mi.
Bathe her, and bring her to me

2. Javier Bardem

You see I do need images but I have been rather upset at the ludicrous emphasis on Bardem’s coif in No Country for Old Men. For one thing, it is not the worst and not even close; see the links below, and for another; he has had worse in other films (see below). And finally just the lack of imagination in so many to focus on the do, and really, shouldn’t there be some haircuts/hairdos that are not perfect. Isn’t film supposed to reflect reality, and there is a lot of bad hair out there.

Best and Worst from Hollywood.

Herald Sun Gallery (Australia), still fixes on Javier.

Nerve.com, here is Javier’s worse haircut.

3. Happiness and Melancholy

I am still thinking about Louis Bayard’s review of Eric Wilson’s Against Happiness and though not sure I agree find the review thought provoking.

Maybe it’s all paying off, though. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, nearly 85 percent of us believe ourselves to be happy or very happy. All power, then, to Eric G. Wilson for writing a book with the refreshing title Against Happiness. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, is seriously bummed by the cultural landscape. “Everywhere I see advertisements offering even more happiness, happiness on land or by sea, in a car or under the stars. . . . It seems truly, perhaps more than ever before, an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.” This “overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness,” he writes, produces only blandness, conformity, “a dystopia of flaccid grins” fueled by Lexapro and Paxil.

Melancholia, by contrast, is “the profane ground out of which springs the sacred.” To prove his point, Wilson takes us on a private survey course, retreading the lonely paths of Beethoven and Coleridge and Rothko and even Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon and Joni Mitchell. In each case, he finds the same equation of melancholy and creation. “Our sadness,” suggests Wilson, “is not aberrant or unseemly or weakness but instead a call to interior depths, to cauldrons out of which will bubble new solutions, crimson and sweet and unforgettable.”

From Washington Post via 3Quarks

4. Useful device

From hedonics.com, purveyers of odd things promoted as useful: for the cigar on the golf course -reminds me of those 99 Useless Japanese Inventions.

Late Saturday Gatherings

This is an image courtesy of another interesting post by deputy dog. Go see for more views of this astounding housing development in Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico.

And now here we have one out of a collection of videos featuring a man who makes instruments out of vegetables and plays them. Below is Angels We Have Heard on High played on a broccoli ocarina. Its quite lovely. (I have to credit GrowABrain for unearthing this treasure).

I am truly frightened

Real posting coming later today but I had to get this up as it might be one the signs of the apocalypse. Its a clip from an appearance on an abysmally stupid show called Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader (once saw a good parody called Are You Smarter than a Cat); the clip speaks for itself…..