Suggestions on destroying earth
There's really no hurry. There's plenty more morphology and physiology to go through.
2009.07.21
bored with modern & contemporary, yet?
"What Stein discovered was a writing style that celebrated its grammatical mistakes. In her most radical prose, she managed to make us conscious of all the linguistic work that is normally done unconsciously. We notice the way verbs instantly get conjugated (even irregular verbs), the way nouns naturally become plural, and the way we amend articles to fit their subjects. Stein always said that the only way to read her writing was to proofread it, to pay acute attention to all the rules she violates. Her errors trace the syntactical structures we can't see, as our "inside becomes outside."* Stein showed us what we put into language by leaving it out."
* This isn't as strange a method as it might seem. Ludwig Wittgenstein hit upon a similar method for his philosophy, which, like Stein's writing, was interested in the uses of language to the exclusion of almost everything else. Wittgenstein once said that he worked by "mak[ing] a tracing of the physiognomy of every [philosophical] error." Only by mapping out mistakes could he see how best to proceed. Samuel Beckett also subscribed to Stein's literary approach. "Let us hope that a time will come," Beckett wrote, "when language is most efficiently used where it is being misused. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it--be it something or nothing--begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today."
Jonah Lehrer, Proust was a Neuroscientist (2007), p. 164.
Here we have 'modernist' thinking.
Alberti's thinking appears more Platonic.
Michelangelo's thinking appears more Aristotelian.
2008.07.21
Big up your home urban conurbation
Hey ether, is that Saturn 5 rocket still laying in the 'backyard' of the Space and Rocket Museum?
I learned CAD at Intergraph in Huntsville back in 1983. Those 10 days in Huntsville actually changed my life.
2005.07.21
Big up your home urban conurbation
Thanks ether. The rocket in the back was laying in pieces back in 1983 as well. Walking between the parts is still fresh in my mind, and the fact that you could hear lots of birds cooing within the pieces kinda blew my mind. I mean, here is the greatest vehicle of flight ever made and it ends up laying next to a farm field in Alabama with lots of birds living in it. Like I said, the time I spent in Huntsville actually changed my life.
2005.07.21
Big up your home urban conurbation
Is that a Space Shuttle there now too?
2005.07.21
Big up your home urban conurbation
The Galapagos Islands?!! cool
Now I want to see Suddenly Last Summer again, just so I can hear Katherine Hepburn [repeatedly] say, "The Encantadas."
2005.07.21
Big up your home urban conurbation
[sent to the architecthetics list 14 December 2000]
Just as an aside to Paul's concise explanation of "architectural language" as it is currently "spoken," whenever I go to study an original edition of Piranesi's Campo Marzio publication, it is in a Frank Furness [designed] building, the Fine Arts Library of the University of Pennsylvania, the place where Louis Kahn held his design studios, and a building recently restored by Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates. Back in the mid-1980s, when I was employed as CAD system manager at U of P's Graduate School of Fine Arts, I had one the coveted balcony offices of Meyerson Hall which offer a majestic view of the Furness Fine Arts Library. Alas, I left Penn because they had to sell their (very expensive Intergraph) CAD system. Since it was towards the end of the semester when I left, I did not have to empty out my office immediately (it was furnished with my own rather large desk and bookcase). One night a few weeks after my leaving, I went back to my office to take inventory of what all had to be moved, and I was surprised to find a small older gentleman sitting at my desk. Actually, we surprised each other, and, since we did not recognize each other, we made our introductions. I told him who I was, and he told me he was Joseph Rykwert. We had a little chat. I told him I recently read one of his texts. He thought I was going to say On Adam's House in Paradise, but I told him it was "Classic and Neo-Classic" in Oppositions 7. Rykwert was surprised by the somewhat obscurity of my reading, and then told me he found my collection of magazines (within my bookcase) interesting. (Rykwert was using my old office for himself, he was, and I think still is, head of Penn's architecture Ph. D program). I was a very eclectic magazine collector throughout the 1980s, and in my office bookshelf, along with Architectural Record and Progressive Architecture, were many issues of Casa Vogue, The Face (UK), and i-D (the UK's indispensable document of fashion). While Rykwert said he particularly enjoyed the architectural magazines, he said nothing about the others. Can you just imagine Joseph Rykwert reading Casa Vogue, The Face, and i-D? Can there be any more reasons why I find architecture and Philadelphia so enchanting?
2005.07.21
Re: public democratic space an illusion
I now recall a whole other very Philadelphian daze just over 16 years ago--the MOVE house bombing in West Philadelphia May 1985. What a day that was. I can still remember seeing the 'percussion' bomb being dropped by helicopter on live television. A city bombing itself is for sure hitting a new level of urban precedence. Ramona Africa was one the few survivors.
And then a couple months later there was quite suddenly the LIVE AID concert, half of which was performed at Philadelphia's now gone JFK Stadium (tradition home of the Army-Navy game). Everyone was now singing We Are The World.
the Summer of 1985: Shout, Shout, Let It All Out!!!
"Campari on the rocks, no fruit, thank you very much."
I was working at the Univ. of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Fine Arts then. CAD system manager, and the landscape dept. was using cad mapping heavily. Their project was funded by the World Bank, and that's when I learned what that organization is really about. Funny world we live in.
And finally that September I was driving a visiting ex-con (convicted murderer actually but finally acquitted) around Philadelphia's smaller museums and antique shops. I've known Jim Williams since 1979, and yes Kevin Spacy played him very well in that movie. In 1983 I lived that scene in the movie where Spacy and Cusack are in the organ room/casino.
private space can be an illusion too.
2001.07.21
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