2012/06/26

the world beneath the city











the slimy thing in the middle that looks like an organ is a colony of tubifex worms in the sewer of north carolina. the couple further downwards is living in tunnels underneath las vegas with about 1000 other homeless people on a wet floor. the last picture is the beginning of the teenage mutant ninja turtles.

2012/06/25

2012/06/21

wunder der schöpfung




a film about the universe
by Hanns Walter Kornblum
from 1925

2012/06/17

2012/06/13

mammatus clouds







ARCHITECTURE

by Georges Bataille (1929)

Architecture is the expression of the true nature of societies, as physiognomy is the expression of the nature of individuals. However, this comparison is applicable, above all, to the physiognomy of officials (prelates, magistrates, admirals). In fact, only society’s ideal nature – that of authoritative command and prohibition – expresses itself in actual architectural constructions. Thus great monuments rise up like dams, opposing a logic of majesty and authority to all unquiet elements; it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that church and state speak to and impose silence upon the crowds. Indeed, monuments obviously inspire good social behaviour and often even genuine fear. The fall of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things. This mass movement is difficult to explain otherwise than by popular hostility toward monuments, which are their veritable masters.
For that matter, whenever we find architectural construction elsewhere than in monuments, whether it be in physiognomy, dress, music, or painting, we can infer a prevailing taste for human or divine authority. The large-scale compositions of certain painters express the will to constrain the spirit within an official ideal. The disappearance of academic pictorial composition, on the other hand, opens the path to the expression (and thereby the exaltation) of psychological processes distinctly at odds with social stability. This, in large part, explains the strong reaction elicited, for over half a century, by the progressive transformation of painting, hitherto characterized by a sort of concealed architectural skeleton.
It is clear, in any case, that mathematical order imposed upon stone is really the culmination of the evolution of earthly forms, whose direction is indicated within the biological order by the passage from the simian to the human form, the latter already displaying all elements of architecture. Man would seem to represent merely an intermediary stage within the morphological development between monkey and building. Forms have become increasingly static, increasingly dominant. From the very outset, in any case, the human and architectural orders make common cause, the latter being only the development of the former. Therefore an attack on architecture, whose monumental productions now truly dominate the whole earth, grouping the servile multitudes under their shadow, imposing admiration and wonder, order and constraint, is necessarily, as it were, an attack on man. Currently, an entire earthly activity, and undoubtedly the most intellectually outstanding, tends, through the denunciation of human dominance, in this direction. Hence, however strange this may seem when a creature as elegant as the human being is involved, a path – traced by the painters – opens up toward bestial monstrosity, as if there were no other way of escaping the architectural straitjacket.

2012/06/06

tennessee williams & fantastic names

 
not only do i love the name tennessee, and not only was tennessee born in one of my other favourite names of places, mississippi, but tennessee from mississippi is also the author of some of my most favourite names of books, plays and films:

Orpheus Descending
You Touched Me
Stairs to the Roof
The Glass Menagerie
A Streetcar Named Desire
Summer and Smoke
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis?
Small Craft Warnings
This Is
The Notebook of Trigorin
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
A House Not Meant to Stand
In Masks Outrageous and Austere
The Last of My Solid Gold Watches
Auto-da-Fé
Moony's Kid Don't Cry
Something Unspoken 







2012/06/05

2012/06/04

2012/06/02

oriana fallaci



During her 1972 interview with Henry Kissinger, Kissinger agreed that the Vietnam War was a "useless war" and compared himself to "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse."  Kissinger later wrote that it was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press."
During her 1979 interview with Ayatollah Khomeini, she addressed him as a "tyrant", took her chador off and called it a stupid medieval rag:
OF- I still have to ask you a lot of things. About the "chador," for example, which I was obliged to wear to come and interview you, and which you impose on Iranian women. [...] I am not only referring to the dress but to what it represents, I mean the apartheid Iranian women have been forced into after the revolution. They cannot study at the university with men, they cannot work with men, they cannot swim in the sea or in a swimming-pool with men. They have to do everything separately, wearing their "chador." By the way, how can you swim wearing a "chador"?

AK- None of this concerns you, our customs do not concern you. If you don't like the islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it, since it is for young women and respectable ladies.

OF- This is very kind of you, Imam, since you tell me that, I'm going to immediately rid myself of this stupid medieval rag. There!