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insideanairport · 4 years

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Jalal Al-e Ahmad's “Gharbzadegi (Weststruckness)”

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In the first chapter of the book, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (جلال آل‌احمد‎) defines the term and what he really means by “Westoxification” (غرب ‌زدگی‎). This term has been translated into English as Weststruckness or Occidentosis. The Persian term was originally created in the Heideggerian philosophical laboratory of Ahmad Fardid (احمد فردید), an Iranian modernist philosopher in 1940. Al-e Ahmad took this term from Fardid and popularized it with his essay under the same title, which later he published as a book. Then in the following chapters, he gives the historical background on how “we” (the Iranians alongside other countries with Islamic background) have become Westoxified? In the opening page of the book, he describes the idea as a disease or sickness.

He designates the ”West” geographically as Europe alongside USSR and North America, as opposed to how white leftists generally define the West (North America and occasionally Western parts of Europe).

”Our time is no longer a time when they scare the people with communism in the ’West’ and with the bourgeoisie and liberalism in the ’East’.” -Al-e Ahmad in Gharbzadegi [Weststruckness], translation by John Green and Ahmad Alizadeh (1)

Al-e Ahmad’s Westoxification is not so different from other classical anti-colonial critics such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Eqbal Ahmad aside from the fact that it was written in 1962 and it is specifically from a Muslim-Iranian perspective. In the book, ”Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid”, Ali Mirsepassi mentions that Iranian intellectuals such as Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati interpreted the term Westoxification in slightly different ways. (2)

Throughout the book, Al-e Ahmad describes the role of culture, universities, and intellectuals in opposition to the forceful Westernization that happened in Iran during the illegitimate rule of the Shah. Al-e Ahmad suggests that we might need radicalism, not Westoxification; the type of consumerism that makes us dependent on the West and its technology. He reminds Iranians that part of their history has been written by the West. In chapter two, he mentions the fact that by Ibn Battuta, Muslims were able to define the West (Maghreb المغرب) before Europeans were able to define Orientals and the ’East’. This topic is mentioned briefly in the recent book “Reversing the Colonial Gaze: Persian Travelers Abroad” by Hamid Dabashi. (3)

I can clearly see this book written on a political background where Western interventions have changed a nation’s destiny simply due to the fact Iran wanted independence from Western hegemony and economic exploitation. After the 1953 CIA coup in Iran, the Iranian government and the Shah became a direct follower of the West. Therefore Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s generations (my father’s generation) took the task of digging up the root of acceptance of Western atrocities in the name of modernization or development. This was simultaneous with the resentment that people held against the forceful interventions that West played in their countries with a complete disregard for people’s sovereignty and autonomy over their territories, internal politics, and religions.

There is also an extensive critic of technology throughout the book, which has been translated as ”Machinstruckness”. Al-e Ahmad talks about the role of spirituality, and what happens to Iranian culture when it's presented as inferior and uncivilized in relation to the West. In chapter seven, he describes Orientalism in a pre-Edward Said way and presents many different ways that the colonial subjects have been trained to see themselves through the gaze of the colonizers and civilized Westerners.

When it comes to the ways that colonialism operates outside of the Middle East, Al-e Ahmad is not the greatest political analyst. His views of India, Africa, Caribbean, South America, and other post-colonial regions are good in relation to colonialism, but they are not so accurate in themselves. He shares the same overall understanding of colonialism with the rest of the global south. Yet, it seems like he has been reading a lot of white Anthropologists. Part of Westoxification (as he argues in chapter seven) is to read about your culture from the Western canon, I am guessing Al-e Ahmad is from a generation that didn't really apply theory to his own life so zealously. After all, he was an academic, and academia as always gives you a natural image of the world that always seems standard and correct.

In the starting chapters of the book, he presents a critic of academic discourses such as Anthropology and Orientalism. The academic discourses in which Europeans make the non-white people as the object of their study. He mentions that colonialization draws its roots from development and scientists and intellectuals are also take part in this issue. Yet, on the last few chapters of the book, he focuses on the Iranian cultural and political response to Westoxification including the resistance (or lack of resistance) from the universities, artists, and cultural institutions.

”And because this discussion will relate primarily to the geographic, linguistic, cultural, and religious background of its author [Jalal Al-e Ahmad], I might expand on the definition by saying that when we Iranians have the machine, that is, when we have built it, we will need its gifts less than its antecedents and adjuncts.” (4)

(The drawings in this edition of Gharbzadegi are by Ardeshir Mohasses and were completed in 1982)

Bib 1. Ahmad, Jalal Al-e. Gharbzadegi (Weststruckness). s.l. : Mazda publishers, 1983. 2. Mirsepassi, Ali. Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid. s.l. : Cambridge University Press, 2017. 3. Dabashi, Hamid. Reversing the Colonial Gaze: Persian Travelers Abroad. s.l. : Cambridge University Press , 2020. 1108488129. 4. Ahmad, Jalal Al-I. Occidentosis:a plague from the West. s.l. : Mizan Press, 1984.

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#read #Jalal Al-e Ahmad #decolonialization #reading #postcolonial #mena #middle east #BetweenSheikhnRefugee

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waterfelled · 4 years

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Week 6 - April 17th Lecture

For the sixth Communication Design Studies lecture for this semester, Andy gave a little tour of some traditional print design books. Many of the guides and grids provided in these manuals of type and layout fascinated themselves with mathematical proportions and headed towards modernist design.

For this post, I would just like to include screenshots from the lecture slides of the books showcased. It’s interesting to see how relatively plain each book is presented and allows the reader, and in turn the designer, to take each teaching into their own work. I just adore the way instructional design is presented here and it’s pretty cool that it is instructional design communicating communication design.

To conclude, I wanted to touch on what Andy finished the lecture off with. To consider the modes of communication that surround us. That is to consider how design is communicated through the everyday devices and objects and images. Is the design created on basis of human or machine? Is it abstract or figurative, conceptual or tangible? Design can be communicated in any of these forms and it’s important to acknowledge and understand how this changes how the design is received and interpreted. I think these are questions we can and should apply to whatever we create.

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lightholme · 3 years

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Thanks for being accepting of my counter argument. There's a lot of information and disinformation out there around climate change. So I appreciate you taking the time to read this source too.

I wouldn't treat Wikipedia as gospel. But it does link to other sources.

There are many hundreds of thousands of climate scientists (including friends of mine) all with different funding sources - as is standard in any research area.

I try and educate myself as best as I can on the topic but I am not a scientist myself. I have found this channel useful: https://youtu.be/FBF6F4Bi6Sg in addition to text books on the topic.

However there is another argument around climate science that I would like to pitch to you. For you to consider...

When I look dispassionately at the two possibilities this is what I come up with:

1. ⁠There is a network of hundreds of thousands of scientists. Again, including people I know. All colluding to falsify data, to trick the world. They together have schemed to create a scientifically plausible, but false assertion that the earth is warming, by pooling their limited individual resources (as very few are millionaires).

Their motives are hard to place, but could be considered as either to self interestedly protect their paychecks of a few tens of thousand a year (average £36k in the UK). In fear that without this hoax there will be no more atmospheric science left to study.

Or they have somehow all agreed to participate it some giant liberal hoax. With some agenda of taking over the world for unclear reasons. A conspiracy that would involve perhaps millions to all be in cahoots. Probably including me?

And they are now dishonestly doing this knowing it will damage their countries economies and their communities well being.

2. There is a small, fantastically wealthy group of oil and gas billionaires. They regularly meet and collude (through groups like OPEC) with an agenda to protect their revenue streams and business empires.

They have motive: to protect their huge sums of money.

They have means: the have billions if not trillions to spend on PR machines. Whose strategies have been charted as moving from 'denial', to 'doubt' to 'its happening but what can you do about it'. This is inline with memos leaked from Exxon.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/

They have opportunity: they are a relatively small group who can meet regularly (unlike the thousands of scientists).

They divert funding to democrats, republicans and UK conservatives in order to lobby and slow progress. Motive being that they can maintain their operations and profits. This is explicitly stated by one of exxons execs this year: https://youtu.be/5v1Yg6XejyE

They have a history of funding scientists and think tanks to try and manipulate data in their favour. Or a preferred technique, discredit existing scientific material. I'd recommend the Merchants of Doubt. A award winning book on this. They dissect in detail how it's not just the same tactics as they tabacco industry used. It's the same PR companies and scientists they have hired to sow disinformation.

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1408824833/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc_TRBMZ815V5N9962QJ5VV

Scenario 3: a bunch of liberals are colluding to falsify climate data so schools are forced to teach CRT and post modernist communism

When left to choose between options 1, 2, and 3, it is of course up to you what you find more plausible.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WAY

When you're an outsider, don't be deterred from doing it. I'm optimistic.1 You don't release code late at night.2 But there is no apparent cost of increasing it.3 The CRM114 Discriminator. No one after reading Aristotle's Metaphysics does anything differently as a result of this practice was that we feared a brand-name VC firm would stick us with a county-by-word to save it from being mangled by some twenty five year old woman who wants to have lots of worries, but you feel like a second class citizen. The real danger is that you should study whatever you were most interested in. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea. Chair designers have to spend on bullshit varies between employers. Well, most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they also have more brand to preserve.4 Html#f8n 19.

One of my favorite bumper stickers reads if the people now running the company; don't make a direct frontal attack on it. And it can last for months. Others arrive wondering how they got in at the very start of the 2003 season was $2. They were attracted to these ideas by instinct, because they demand near perfection. No one seems to have voted for intelligence.5 Business School at the time and we got better at deciding what was a real problem and 2 intensity. Since it is a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or Battlefield Earth.

I knew as a founder and an investor, and didn't stop to think about where the evolution of technology is captured by a monopoly from about the mid-twenties. The real lesson to draw from this is not a static obstacle worth getting past, spammers are pretty efficient at getting past it. I know of zero. But don't give them much money either. Work in small groups. Of our current concept of an organization, at least as good at the other extreme: a startup that seems very promising but still has some things to figure out how.6 Few others could have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head that would explode if combined.7 We're up against a blank wall. If startups become a cheap commodity, more people would do. When you raise a lot of people.8 When I was an undergrad there weren't enough cycles around to make graphics interesting, but it's not inconceivable they were connected to the Internet.

Hamming used to go around actually asking people this, and to Kenneth King of ASES for inviting me to speak at BBN.9 I'm pretty sure now that my friend Trevor Blackwell is a great way to solve problems you're bad at writing and don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. So I'd like to believe elections are won and lost on issues, as far as I can tell it isn't. People in America. Should you add x feature? So which ones?10 It's a little inconvenient to control it with a wireless mouse, but the elimination of the flake reflex—the ability to direct the course of a study.11

Because I thought about the topic.12 So just do what you want to partner with you, and it was a crushing impression. It's what a startup buys you is time.13 In either case the implications are similar. Octopart is sending them customers for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, acquisitions still carry some stigma of inadequacy. Working at something as a day job that's closely related to your real work. Here are some of your claims and granting others.14 Knowledge is power. A few years before by a big company. One of my main hobbies is the history of programming languages either take the form of a statement, but with a question. Though in a sense attacking you. For founders that's more than a couple weeks.

Maybe if you can afford to be rational and prefer the latter.15 For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves can build, and that it was cheap. Yet the cause is human nature. Particularly in technology, at least, nothing good. But when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. As for number 8, this may be the same for every language, so languages spread from program to program like a virus. It's like calling a car a horseless carriage.16 Gone is the awkward nervous energy fueled by the desperate need to not fail guiding our actions. 9889 and. If the company is presumably worth more, and b reach and serve all those people have to choose one out of God's book, and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen fast. Either the company is already a write-off.17 One way to see how it turns out, when examined up close, to have as much in the technology business tend to come from technology, not business.18

And for a significant number. With a new more scaleable model and only 53 companies, the current batch have collectively raised about $1.19 Rise up, cows! The results so far bear this out.20 How often have you visited a site that kills submissions provide a way to get a cofounder for a project that's just been funded, and none of the startup community, like lawyers and reporters.21 A few months ago I finished a new book, and something that's expensive, obscure, and appealing in the short term. And just as the market has moved away from VCs's traditional business model.

Notes

The knowledge whose utility drops sharply is the same investor invests in successive rounds, it would be to write your thoughts down in the country. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christians.

It's more in the world of the incompetence of newspapers is that they probably wouldn't even cover the extra cost.

If you're good you'll have to mean the company.

Eighteen months later Google paid 1. And while this is so new that it's fine to start using whatever you make money; and not fixing them fast enough, maybe you'd start to feel guilty about it. It requires the kind of method acting. It doesn't take a small seed investment in you, they sometimes say.

Yahoo. They therefore think what drives users to switch to OSX. 05 15, the group of picky friends who proofread almost everything I say the rate of change in the definition of property. I talk about humans being meant or designed to express algorithms, and oversupply of educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations.

It's one of the founders of failing startups would even be symbiotic, because sometimes artists unconsciously use tricks by imitating art that is a matter of outliers, are better college candidates. If the rich paid high taxes?

But Goldin and Margo think market forces in the long tail for other reasons, including both you and the ordering system and image generator were written in 6502 machine language.

We did not become romantically involved till afterward.

They'll have a better education. Norton, 2012.

If Paris is where people care most about art. Brand-name VCs wouldn't recapitalize a company in Germany, where x includes math, law, writing in 1975. Com/spam. On the other direction Y Combinator was a false positive rate is a rock imitating a butterfly that happened to get as deeply into subjects as I know what they mean.

Big technology companies. I'm not making any predictions about the difference. These range from make-believe, is he going to be an open booth.

There should probably be the more corrupt the rulers.

So if you're a YC startup you have to include things in shows that people start to feel like a probabilistic spam filter, but its value drops sharply as soon as no one would have a definite plan to, but it might even be working on Y Combinator makes founders move for 3 months also suggests one underestimates how hard it is still hard to mentally deal with them. And that is worth doing something, but it might make them want you. Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, v: i mentions several that tried to raise money.

So if you're college students. Some introductions to other knowledge. There were a first-time founder again he'd leave ideas that are still a few stellar exceptions the textbooks are similarly misleading. You can get for free.

94 says a 1952 study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome. Sites that habitually linkjack get banned. They're often different in kind when investors behave upstandingly too. So whatever market you're in, say, real estate development, you will find a blog on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the editor in Lisp.

In fact the decade preceding the war on. I mean efforts to manipulate them. Though they were forced to stop raising money from mediocre investors. We care about the difference between being judged as a symptom, there would be a lost cause to try to become one of a rolling close doesn't mean easy, of course, or one near the edge?

They don't make users register to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's up to 20x, since human vision is the discrepancy between government receipts as a rule of thumb, the approval of an email being spam. Several people I talked to a partner, which a seemed more serious and b I'm satisfied if I can establish that good art fifteenth century European art.

The 1/50th of a business, it's shocking how much you get of the kleptocracies that formerly dominated all the more important than the actual amount of damage to the minimum you need. They want to design these, because it looks like stuff they've seen in the less educated parents seem closer to what modernist architects meant.

I don't think it's roughly correct to say that IBM makes decent hardware. Copyright owners tend to be actively curious.

So if you're a loser they usually decide in way less than the others. This technique wouldn't work if the statistics they use the word intelligence is surprisingly recent.

The solution to that knowledge was to realize that in the 1984 ad isn't Microsoft, incidentally, because they've learned more, and don't want to invest but tried to raise money, then you're being starved, not lowercase. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise.

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uomo-accattivante · 7 years

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I dug up this very interesting old Q&A session Rian Johnson did with Alex Garland about Ex Machina back on April 18, 2015, at The Arclight in Los Angeles. It was cool hearing Garland briefly talk about Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson right before Johnson started working with both of them on Star Wars: The Last Jedi. And after hearing this Q&A, I can totally see why Garland wanted to retain Scott Rudin as his producer when he decided to make Annihilation.

The main points they covered in the Q&A are encapsulated below:

Writing For A Low Budget Sci-Fi Movie

Rian Johnson: What was the origin of this in terms of the writing?

Alex Garland: When I was trying to describe what this film would be I used to call it a sci-fi psychological thriller and “Sleuth” was a film I did think about because of the way the allegiances shift. In terms of the genesis, it was really just reading over years about AI and some of the problems of mind and consciousness… I’ve now been working in film for around about 15 years and inevitably some of the processes of film, you learn them in sort of a helpless way. And if there’s something that requires a lot of creative latitude as this did, probably unconsciously, I deliberately wrote something that I knew we could make cheaply. Limited locations, limited cost…

RJ: At the same time, it doesn’t have that thing [where] it feels like they compromised in order to make a cheap movie here, it looks gorgeous. I was actually gonna ask you some more mundane questions about where you shot it, in terms of the house, how much of that was built, whether there was found locations in terms of the exteriors…

AG: It was four weeks in Pinewood, and two weeks on location. [For] all the things you can do to save money, the best thing you can do is have a really short principal photography period. So, it was a six week shoot and then there was a backward element of it which is you need to find a location and be able to build to it. The location was in Norway, and you know it’s funny the way imagery in film works. Iceland was quickly out of the question because it’s been mined by cinema so much and you start to think, “I know that glacier.”

Shooting In Norway

AG: We ended up finding Norway and what was great about it, Norway’s quite an interesting country because they’re the only country in the world that did the right thing when they discovered oil which was to nationalize it and then keep all the money and spend it on the country itself. So it’s this amazingly affluent country, which makes it very expensive to shoot in. But you get weird modernist architecture in the middle of nowhere and the landscape is not too familiar to us. It’s semi-familiar because there’s skies and mountains and glaciers and rivers, but we’re not too steeped in it so Norway’s perfect. [We] found a beautiful house and a hotel.

RJ: What was the house itself? Was it an empty house? Was it somebody’s house?

AG: It was a house that this guy had been building and nearly finished so he didn’t mind a film crew turning up. So, for example, the living room where these two guys talk at times which has this strange rock wall kind of intruding into the room, that’s the living room of that guy’s house. These beautiful cinema-screen-shaped windows that have these panoramic views is an eco hotel which is about 15 minutes away. And what we would do is build sets like Nathan’s bedroom and study with the glass wall, where we brought that rock wall into Pinewood and tried to tie it together loosely.

RJ: Because it was such a quick shoot, obviously exactly the things that make it cheap also make it very intensive in terms of it’s the performances that carry this movie all the way through to a large extent. Did you have rehearsal time with the actors?

AG: Yeah that was crucial. We had, actually, a lot of discussions and then we had rehearsals because there wasn’t going to be time to talk about motivation, for example, on set. And the process of shooting it was very intense and complicated because the film has to have a kind of zen vibe about it and the second you’re moving the camera, it’s like, in come the guys chucking down boards to move the dolly and a real frenzy of activity and then back to this quiet mode. And you’re absolutely right, that leans hardest of all on the actors. Pretty hard for the camera crew, but particularly hard for the actors. And they had to keep a kind of good close track of what they were doing the whole time, but they totally nailed it.

Casting Alicia Vikander And Domhnall Gleeson

RJ: So, uh, Oscar [Isaac] and Domhnall I know… somebody should put them in a big movie. [laughs] But actually, the big revelation for me was Alicia [Vikander]. I’m sure she’s been in other stuff, but this is the first thing I’ve seen of her. Talk to me about where you saw and discovered her.

AG: She was in a Danish film called “A Royal Affair” and she was, I’m guessing, like 20 or 21 and acting opposite the incredibly charismatic, powerful actorMads Mikkelsen and that thing happens that we all recognize, it’s not a secret. It’s not like you work in the film industry to recognize good acting. I’ve literally never met anyone who thought Philip Seymour Hoffman wasn’t a great actor. So you know it when you see it and your eye would just track what she was doing and register how confident and complex her performance was. And that’s also true of Oscar, the slightly odd one out was Domnhall because this is the third film we worked on together and so that was different, I just sent him the script and said, “Will you do it?”

RJ: Was he the first one on board?

AG: Yeah.

RJ: Do you write actually seeing actors in your head?

AG: Yeah I do, and that could be complicated. It’s a bit like temp score when you’re cutting because you can get temp-itis, you know, fall in love with a bit of temp score and find that you keep trying to nudge the composer towards copying it. So, yes I do, but I also try to be self-aware and then to reject it later, but Domhnall was in my mind because it’s a funny part… It’s not something that all male actors want to do, in a way, to be the recipient, to be on the receiving end so much and I just knew that he could do it.

RJ: At the same time, it’s also a part that, to his credit, it’s deceptive… he’s doing so much in it with so little and he’s so good at communicating, largely reacting to the world around him, guiding the viewer through the story.

AG: And not telegraphing what’s actually going on. Because it can be hard for everybody to avoid the nudges and winks, like “I’m actually more powerful in this scene than you think I am.” But he was incredibly disciplined about that.

Designing Ava

AG: With Ava, it was a three step process, with a step back thing which is this is a post-iPhone world. We’re used to tech being beautifully designed essentially. Initially, it was to do with what she didn’t look like. C-3PO, for example, was a problem. Gold metal immediately put C-3PO in mind. White plastic put Chris Cunningham’s Bjork video [for “All Is Full Of Love” in mind] which was also riffed on by “I Robot.” [And] even if people haven’t seen “Metropolis,” [Maria] is an iconic image that it casts an incredibly long shadow. So, when she first appears you don’t want to initially be thinking of another film.

Second thing, she had to unambiguously be a machine so that it didn’t give wise in the narrative the possibility that it might be a young woman wearing a robot suit. So, missing areas of her body dealt with that. More important than that, the breakthrough aspect was this mesh that follows the contours of Alicia Vikander’s body, which meant that you immediately see her as a machine and then you immediately start to move away from that because as the light captures it a bit like a spiderweb, invisible in some circumstances, visible in others… you get this glancing, ephemeral sense of a young woman.

Misdirecting the Audience

RJ: As a filmmaker, I’m curious in terms of the editing, when you got into the cutting room was there anything that surprised you that you had to adjust in terms of where the audience was keeping up with it, or what they were thinking during different parts of it?

AG: I think, in the edit, of this and other projects, from my point of view, you have to run on instinct because you’re so steeped in it. At least in my experience, it’s very hard to be precise and rational about it. Wood for the trees, essentially. But there were some things I felt pretty sure of, and one thing was that we could nudge the audience or sections of the audience. Some people just want a story and will just accept whatever comes and others, their antennae are up and they are hunting and they want to get ahead of it in some way. And I felt pretty sure that there were two key misdirections we could do that would take attention away from the other stuff we wanted to keep more covert. But one of them was that audiences, you can assume literacy in film audiences. They will have seen “Blade Runner,” for example. And so they will be thinking “I know what’s going on”—

RJ: Domhnall is a robot.

AG: Right, exactly, so there are symmetrical scars on his back. And there’s a slightly implausible backstory.

RJ: Which you only reveal very slightly in the thing so even as an audience member you’re thinking, “How clever, I just caught that.”

AG: Exactly, yeah. So one is that train of thought that then leads to him investigating himself, in a way that an audience might have investigated him as well. And the other was the Japanese-appearing robot, Kyoko, that of course also people will know quite quickly that this is a machine. And in intention, I hoped, the antennae twitching audience will relax and think “oh I get this.” I think the ideal state is to just let the thing happen. You know, I sometimes think the best way to see a film — no, I know — no trailer, no information. Certainly, that for me, that’s my favorite way. So, in a way, the edit was partly about using those misdirections, I guess.

RJ: No, I think it all works to its benefit. And like I said, ultimately, it does that magic trick that my favorite movies all do, which is, it does exactly what it told you it was going to do and you’re surprised by it by the end.

Also, here is a video of the Q&A session above if you’re interested in watching it: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/83375013-132.html

#spoilers #oscar isaac #ex machina #alex garland #rian johnson #podcast #domhnall gleeson #alicia vikander #star wars #the last jedi #the playlist #the arclight #q&a #audio

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anamaap · 4 years

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C&CS reflection: European Modernism

How did the grid and systems design influence the development of European design across the 20th century?

The most important evolution to typography took place in the first half of the 20th century, with the development of technologies, designers were faced with the challenge to create new meaning to art and design for the modern age. As a result the modernists art schools emerged. Early modernist movements drew inspiration from the chaos of the modern age, such as Futurism, an artistic movement founded by italian poet, Filippo Tommaso. He believed that man and machine should work together to develop even greater creations, and through that he declared a revolution against the conventions of the printed page. Futurist typography was free flowing and dynamic, expressing the sounds and sensations.

In contrast to that, after the second world war, the Swiss Grid Style - also known as the International Typographic Style - emerged by Swiss designers, such as Armin Hofman, Josef Muller, Hans Neuberg and so on. The design style was characterized as ‘cold and emotionally sterile’ that became very influential in the mid 20th century. These artists saw design as a tool for industrial production and pursued objective visual communication. Swiss Style pioneer Josef Muller, founder of the Zurich published journal Neue Grafik, prioritized funcional and objective design by restricting design elements through a set of imaginary confining lines and grid. For the time this design style that adopted a geometrical aesthetic was considered to be novel and rare. The style incorporated mathematical methods of spatial organization into the work and was very reminiscent of the language of constructivism.

Are these ideas still relevant today?

The grid design is to this day considered the foundation of graphic design. The grid began as a system for organizing text, and these ideas still remain relevant to this day. It is used to teach the basics of page composition and notion of space within a page. With the help of design softwares it is much easier to define those spaces with much more precision and the movement is no longer considered a novelty. The grid based design is now very popular in the world of web design. It is a paramount tool of communication, showing great importance to simplifying navigation though the page and communicating trust towards its users.

The international swiss style teaches you how to be reasonable with the elements in a page and build a pleasing special system. Despite its ridgid nature the grid system can accommodate an incredible number of design possibilities, because it allows a starting point for a designer to compose the writing elements on a page. Muller-Brockman, father of Swiss Typography draws inspiration from nature and earlier human civilizations, by looking at ‘ancient systems of order’ for example, honeycombs made by bees, and studies of the proportions of the human body. Other things that evoke a sense of order and structure that inspired Muller-Brockman are Egyptian pictograms, the Gutenberg bible, music manuscript and geometry of traditional Japanese architecture. As a result he concluded that design required a “high degree of not only emotional but also intellectual capacity for creative achievement”. This line was drawn in design because it's a field that embraces both the arts and commerce.

https://trydesignlab.com/blog/grids-ui-ux-graphic-design-quick-history-5-amazing-tips/#3

https://trydesignlab.com/blog/grids-ui-ux-graphic-design-quick-history-5-amazing-tips/

https://visualartsdepartment.wordpress.com/modernism/

http://blog.ocad.ca/wordpress/visd2004-su2017-c/home/modernist-typography/

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optimisticracer · 4 years

Text

MATERIAL MATTERS Half-Term Assignment: Designer @ Maker Questions

Yves Béhar, founder of Fuse project

https://www.dezeen.com/2020/10/27/the-ocean-cleanup-sunglasses-yves-behar-fuseproject/

The Ocean Cleanup has teamed up with Yves Béhar to create a pair of sunglasses from plastic that the non-profit has collected from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

This marks the first time that the Dutch organisation has created a product from the plastic it has retrieved from the ocean as part of its attempt to go "full circle from trash to treasure".

The sunglasses are made from plastic debris collected from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Produced by Italian eyewear brand Safilo, the glasses have a classic shape reminiscent of Ray Ban's Wayfarers, rendered in deep, navy blue, with distinctive turquoise hinges connecting each arm to the frame.

"It was important for the glasses to embrace the natural, raw iridescence of the blue material, as for me it mimics the beauty of the sea and says something about the material's origin," Fuseproject founder Béhar told Dezeen.

The design by Yves Béhar features a distinctive light blue hinge

The product is designed to be "useful and durable" and once it reaches the end of its life, it can be easily disassembled into its constituent parts and recycled once again.

"The material is a bit softer structurally than standard plastic, which delivers a nice feel in the hand and on the face," said Béhar.

"By designing a slightly thicker frame, we were able to transform the softer plastic composite into a solid and durable product.

"Our easily removable hinges are not inserted within the plastic as is common in traditional eyewear, which means the glasses can be repaired or recycled at the end of their use," he continued.

Italian eyewear brand Safilo manufactures the sunglasses

According to The Ocean Cleanup, the plastic used to create the sunglasses was entirely sourced from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) – an area of 1.6 million square kilometres between Hawaii and the coast of California where an estimated 79 thousand tonnes of plastic has accumulated.

The Ocean Cleanup worked with independent certification body DNV GL to verify the plastic's origin and develop a new international standard for how companies can prove the "source and authenticity" of the marine plastic they use in their products going forwards.

Called the Chain of Custody Standard for Plastics Retrieved in the Hydrosphere, this sets out a number of requirements that companies need to meet including a traceable supply chain "from water to shore".

They come with a tubular black sunglasses case

The glasses come with matching, tubular black cases, made from the 2,000 kilograms of plastic that were collected during The Ocean Cleanup's pilot mission.

This started in September 2018 and had to be aborted early when the non-profit's floating rig, which skims the surface of the ocean for plastic, unexpectedly broke down.

The glasses represent the first product created from plastic collected by the Ocean Cleanup

The actual glasses are made from plastic that was collected during a subsequent, second dispatch in June 2019 and returned to shore at the end of the year.

All profits generated from the sale of the sunglasses will go back into funding future cleanup missions, with each pair paying to clean an area of the GPGP equivalent to 24 football fields according to the organisation.

To collect the plastic the non-profit uses U-shaped floating barriers, which are pushed along the ocean by wind and waves, to scoop up plastic that is floating up to three metres below the surface.

All profits will go back into funding future cleanup missions

Despite raising $30 million in funding, The Ocean Cleanup's approach has prompted criticism from the scientific community due to the fact that 94 per cent of the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the GPGP are microplastics smaller than five millimetres in size.

These are found not just on the surface but all the way down on the ocean floor and cannot be collected as easily as larger pieces. As Italian environmentalist Cristina Gabetti explained in an interview with Dezeen, "it's a soup more than an island [of floating debris]", as it is often portrayed.

Another environmental organisation, Parley for the Oceans, already repurposed collected marine plastic for a collection of sunglasses back in 2018.

As part of an ongoing collaboration with Adidas, the initiative has also released trainers, boots and an entire swimwear line, as well as football kits for Manchester United and Real Madrid fashioned from recycled, ocean-bound plastic.

Satyendra Pakhale, designer

https://www.satyendra-pakhale.com/about/

Satyendra Pakhalé

MAKING WHAT HE IMAGINES: PRODUCT DESIGN ALUM SATYENDRA PAKHALÉ FUSES ARCHITECTURAL TEXTURE AND POETRY

Amsterdam-based designer Satyendra Pakhalé (BS 94 Product Design), whose sensory-sparking and sinuous work—held in museum collections worldwide—spans industrial, transportation and architectural design, grew up in India loving drawing, painting, physics and mechanics.

Encouragement from his socially conscious teacher parents pushed him to be a maker at an early age. He was also inspired by the Ajanta Buddhist caves, paintings and rock-cut architecture—dating back to the second century B.C.—in the Maharashtra region where he was raised.

Satyendra Pakhalé's Flower Offering Chair, 2001, for Ammann Gallery.

1 of 7

Satyendra Pakhalé's Add-On Radiator, 2004, for Tubes Radiatori, photo by Tom Vack.

“When I was growing up in India, things were not industrially made, so you made your own,” he says. “You didn't go to a toy store to buy a toy. You would pick up wood, go to a carpenter and make toys for yourself. You make what you can imagine. That's exactly what I do today, except with somewhat better abilities.”

After discovering a book in his school library by the modernist American designer George Nelson, and reading it cover-to-cover, Pakhalé decided to pursue design. He earned a degree from the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Bombay). When he expressed to his mother the wish to study abroad, she spoke to family friend and Southern California native Dr. Orpha Speicher, who founded a missionary hospital in his hometown. She told Pakhalé’s mom about ArtCenter, and brought back a brochure from a summer trip.

Pakhalé reached out to ArtCenter and was offered scholarships to study at the former ArtCenter Europe campus in Switzerland. “Going abroad from India at the time was not easy for various reasons, including foreign exchange limits,” he says. At ArtCenter Europe, Pakhalé was taught a variety of design thinking methods by “wonderful minds,” he says, from designer Wolfgang Joensson to Simon Fraser, who worked then at Porsche Design.

Satyendra Pakhalé’s KUBU Chaise Longue, 2009, for Ammann Gallery, photo by Satyendra Pakhalé Associates.

After graduating, Pakhalé worked at Frog Design and Philips Design. At the latter, his projects included working on the Pangéa, a 1997 concept car developed for French car company Renault and designed for use by environmental researchers. After leaving Philips, he started his own design practice in Amsterdam in 1998, where his clients include Poltrona Frau–Haworth, Novartis and Cappellini.

“I was eager to explore all sectors of design, from handmade to machine-made and in-between,” he says. When it comes to his oeuvre, Pakhalé says his work is rooted in the culture of making and themes of poetic analogy, perception, atmosphere, social modernity, secular humanism, craftsmanship and technology. “I aim to create sensorial qualities in industrial design, such as the texture and warmth we recognize in age-old objects, yet without passively accepting traditions,” Pakhalé says. “The sensorial experience is essential.”

Satyendra Pakhalé's Panther, 2002, photo by Satyendra Pakhalé Associates.

Satyendra Pakhalé's B.M. Objects in 2019 monograph Satyendra Pakhalé: Culture of Creation, book design by Main Studio, photo by Rick Keus.

For instance, his 2002 multi-chair Panther, with its iconographic swooping lines and curves, was designed to celebrate the golden jubilee of Italian furniture company Moroso, and combines three sitting positions in a single form, evoking a leaping panther. “I created it to entice the user to try out various postures: sitting, lounging, reclining,” he says. “Panther is intended to make us aware of our existence and to take time for contemplation and deep breathing.” His 2001 Flower Offering Chair is a chair-like ceramics piece, structurally strong enough to sit on, with two removable vases in its backrest to hold flowers.

Satyendra Pakhalé: Culture of Creation, the first comprehensive monograph devoted to Pakhalé’s work, was released in September 2019 as a “labor of love,” he says. It includes images of his work and 12 critical essays by a range of designers and thinkers, including architect Juhani Pallasmaa, Museum of Modern Art Senior Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli, and former Philips Design Chief Executive Officer Stefano Marzano.

“Each project we work on goes through rigor and lots of care, and we stand behind each piece that we bring into the world,” Pakhalé says. “The monograph speaks about that journey.”

Alice Fox

https://www.textileartist.org/exhibition-review-tide-marks-alice-fox

Textile artist Alice Fox is inspired by the natural world and detail of organic things. In 2012 she was the artist in residence at Spurn Point National Nature Reserve where where she developed her work based on coastal landscapes. Here, regular TextileArtist.orgcontributor, Sue Stone considers Alice’s recent exhibition ‘Tide Marks’ which is currently showing at the Gate Gallery in Grimsby, Lincolnshire.

Alice Fox – Sand Marks Cloths

Tide Marks: Alice Fox

Gate Gallery, 12, Brighowgate, Grimsby, N E Lincolnshire, DN32 0QX Exhibition runs from 24 October to 30 November 2013

Words by Sue Stone

Alice Fox – Tide Line (detail)

The venue for the exhibition is Gate Gallery, a small independent gallery in Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire, UK, the town where Alice Fox grew up. Grimsby has close connections with the sea and so it is entirely appropriate for Alice to show her latest body of work ‘Tide Marks’ here.

The first thing I notice on entering the ‘Tide Marks’ exhibition is the tranquility of the work displayed. The images celebrate the coastal landscape and really capture that peaceful feeling of being at the beach with waves lapping the seashore, the ebb and flow of the tide and the imprints on wet sand. Alice has an affinity with nature and, in particular, the sea coast and it shows. She is a trained naturalist with a degree in Physical Geography who later returned to college to complete a Textiles degree as a mature student, graduating in 2011. She has been developing a close relationship with the shoreline and this series of work is an extension of the work made during of her residency at Spurn National Nature Reserve in 2012.

Alice Fox – Tide Marks Book

Natural fragments

The work on show consists of a selection of abstract images in various different media, including works on paper, cloth and tapestry weave.

It ranges from a series of large scale, wall hung textiles, and large, framed works on paper, to small, intimate prints and concertina, hand made artist’s books whose colour and printed marks are derived from beach-combed items, including rusty metal and collected man made and natural fragments.

I really enjoy the mark making aspect of the work; the layers built up with the use of rusty metal, collograph printing and embossing (using textured plates made with found items which are then put through a printing press) before adding hand stitch. It is apparent from looking at the work that Alice has observed, and made careful decisions on which marks should be included, after recording and gathering patterns and textures on her way.

Alice Fox – Sand Marks Cloths & Sand Marks

Coastal landscapes

My own favourite is the series of unframed hanging cloths which incorporate rust print, collograph print and stitch. The rust print is made using found rusty objects which have been collected on beaches that Alice has visited. They are used to make unpredictable, experimental marks and stains, the marks changing each time the object is used. Creases, tucks and stitches are used to then add texture and form to the individual hangings and when brought together they make up an installation measuring approximately 5 metres wide by 2 metres high.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of specially commissioned poems and prose by the writer Nigel Morgan. These, and a selection of images of the coastal landscapes that provide Alice’s inspiration, sketches, found objects, work in progress as well as some of the final work shown in the exhibition are included in an A5, 80 page landscape book ‘Tide Marks’.

The exhibition is well worth a visit if you are in the Grimsby area.

Further information can be found at: alicefox.co.uk

The ‘Tide Marks’ book is for sale at: alicefox.bigcartel.com

About the reviewer

Sue Stone is a member of the 62 group of Textile Artists and the Society of Designer Craftsmen. She studied Fashion at St Martins School of Art and Embroidery at Goldsmiths College and exhibits both nationally and internationally.

https://www.dezeen.com/2019/06/28/jony-ive-legacy-apple-head-designer/

According to Apple there are currently something in the region of 1.4 billion active users of its devices. There's a good chance that you are reading this article on one of them. Given how ubiquitous they have become it is quite staggering to think that the design of every single one of those devices was overseen by Jony Ive, Apple's chief designer, who has just announced he is leaving the company to set up his own firm.

Moving from the UK, Ive joined Apple in 1992 – seven years after Steve Jobs departed the company he founded and five years before his return as CEO in 1997. Apple was already sliding into the trouble it would find itself in during the mid-1990s, but didn't realise it yet. Ive was involved with the design of several innovative though ultimately ill-fated products of that era, notably the various iterations of the Newton MessagePad and the Twentieth Anniversary Mac. But as Apple increasingly flailed around, these products never lived up to their striking designs.

Jobs' return brought discipline back to the company. He cancelled a number of product lines he felt weren't up to it or were distractions, including the Newton, and reduced Apple's overly complex range of Macs to a 4x4 grid: desktop and portable, consumer and professional. But something wholly new was needed to get customers excited again. This came in the colourful teardrop form of the iMac.

Ive's truly iconic design symbolised Apple's rebirth and return to relevance

Apple wanted the iMac to appear as ground-breaking as the original Macintosh was back in 1984, even creating images with "Hello (again)" printed on its the screen in homage to its predecessor's famous "Hello" message. But in reality, the iMac was not so different from the existing all-in-one Power Macintosh G3 when it came to its internals. What mattered, of course, was how it was packaged.

Ive's truly iconic design symbolised Apple's rebirth and return to relevance. It also sold in the millions, helping dig the company out of the financial black hole it found itself in. Its colourful, translucent aesthetic was, of course, much imitated, in everything from kettles and radios to electric toothbrushes. Few designs have ever been so influential – and certainly no computer designs, which before then rarely strayed from the beige box.

Dieter Rams is often seen as a major influence on Ive's approach to design, one that Ive has himself acknowledged. From both an aesthetic and philosophical point of view, Rams' 10 principles of good design run through Ive's work. But there are also some areas where they diverge considerably.

Most obviously, this can be seen through the realities of obsolescence, which contravene Rams' insistence that a product should be long-lasting, but is an inherent and vital part of the technology industry. More broadly, the idea that form should ultimately follow function becomes rather more complicated when that function takes place within the confines of a digital display.

Launched in October 2001, the iPod was in many ways the apotheosis of this idea

A computer – whether in the form of a desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, or even watch – is always a conduit to something else: what's displayed on the screen. So a designer has to balance the desire to get the device out of the way of the screen while creating a desirable object that will sell.

Launched in October 2001, the iPod was in many ways the apotheosis of this idea. Its clickwheel was both functional and iconic. But the real masterstroke were the white Earpods. Headphones up to that point had always been black. The white headphones differentiated the iPod and its users in a simple yet powerful way.

I was an early adopter, buying a second generation iPod in 2002, and I always remember the first time I saw someone else with the same white Earpods. From something you hardly ever see, they quickly became the height of fashion, driving iPod sales, before becoming so ubiquitous that competitors were even making their own white headphones. Today's wireless Airpods mirror this approach and trajectory. Pilloried on their launch for their strange appearance, these little white sticks poking out of your ears have become a phenomenon.

Looking across the range of products that Ive has designed one realises quite how varied they are: from the exuberant bright colours and curving forms of the iMac G3 to the pared-back asceticism of something like the Mac mini. This variety is why it makes no sense to call Ive a minimalist. Instead, his approach might be better described as strategic – always obsessed by materials and detailing but tailoring his design language to the circumstance and application.

Looking across the range of products that Ive has designed one realises quite how varied they are

This approach accounts for what some have seen as design missteps. From the apparently over-designed original iBook to the infamous "hockey puck" mouse, there are a number of examples one could cite, but few that provoked the furore of the iPhone X's "notch".

But far from being a design failure as many rashly saw it, the "notch" is clearly the result of a thoroughly thought-through decision to create a means of being able to tell an iPhone at a glance, a task previously performed by the home button which the iPhone X had eliminated.

In 2015, Ive was promoted to chief design officer, now formally responsible for all aspects of design at Apple. However, his influence had already extended into software, having led the human interface team since 2012. He was the driving force behind iOS 7's dramatic redesign, abandoning skeuomorphism – which incidentally Jobs had loved – in favour of a pared-back, almost entirely abstract design language.

Again this wasn't purely about aesthetics, but the result of strategic decisions. The original iPhone had created a new paradigm for interacting with a display, and its heavy 3D effects and borrowings from the physical were vital to it being intuitive. By 2013, when iOS 7 was released, most of Apple's customers knew how to use a touchscreen phone, and coupled with much higher resolution displays, it was now possible to eliminate the interface "chrome" and allow more room for content.

When Steve Jobs died in 2011, many observers saw Ive as the heir apparent, carrying the torch for decades to come

Latterly it's appeared that Ive has entered a kind of Baroque phase with thinness becoming an end in itself. Where before thinness was strategic, distilling the iPhone and iPad down to their very essence as simple sheets of glass, it's now being taken to an extreme, almost becoming an over-exaggeration.

Most users would probably be happy for their device to a bit little thicker and heavier if it gave them more battery life. But such compromises are rare in Ive's work, which at its best – and it usually is – is design as polemic.

When Steve Jobs died in 2011, many observers saw Ive as the heir apparent, carrying the torch for decades to come, though perhaps admitting the golden years that yielded the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad were over. So now Ive has left, the question is, what next for Apple? Given that the design team works years ahead, it will be a while before we get a glimpse of Apple post-Ive.

My guess is that they will probably carry on as before, so fully have Jobs and Ive instilled their ethos into the spirit of the company. But whatever Ive himself does next, his legacy as the most important designer of the last two decades is assured.

Photography is by Marcus Dawes.

Owen Hopkins is an architectural writer, historian and curator. He is senior curator of exhibitions and education at Sir John Soane's Museum and was previously architecture programme curator at the Royal Academy of Arts. He is the author of books including Reading Architecture: A Visual Lexicon (2012), Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide (2014) and Mavericks: Breaking the Mould of British Architecture (2016).

What core themes do they explore through their work?

Founded in 1999 by designer Yves Béhar Fuse project, explores items from accessories to uitilities for the househod to things to untilise workspace surroundings. Through his business Satendra Pakhale works in a varity of platforms including industrial.design, mobility, architecture and editions.

How do the explore this? What practicle methods or materials do they use? What influences their choice of materials?

The materials used would be varied depending on the brief that is being worked upon, plastic is used in many of both Yves Behar and Satendra Pakhale’s works and this could perhaps be due to the negitivity of the material that’s been generated.

Do they use specific process to reasurch and develop ideas?

At the time of writing it does not seem like either designer has a specific process of research to develop their ideas.

How could you apply their approach, process or materials to kick start some sample making?

This is a very simple question to anwser but I must dispel the idea of using these makers approaches simply because they would have access to industry know how process & materials. Having said this there are nearly always is a way to find material which is usually easy to come by.

What have you learned from this designer / maker?

They specifically work to a useable product, however these product(s) have no bearing in motorsport or F1, however having said this the priciples can be taken and appiled to F1.

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archiveofprolbems · 4 years

Text

The Potency of Images: Reading David Joselit’s After Art*

*David Joselit, After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). David Joselit’s book takes up the current condition of an accelerated and uncontrollably proliferating circulation of images, and specifically the implications of this condition for the practice and theory of art. Freed by technical forms of reproduction from being tethered to a specific medium, images of various provenances can no longer be reliably mapped into the categorial and institutional space of “Art” or, mutatis mutandis, excluded from aesthetic consideration, as being definitively “not-Art.”

In Joselit’s account, we should rather think of images—whether originating in the artworld or outside it—as something akin to monetary “currencies,” which can take mutable material and immaterial or informational forms depending on their context and function, and which foster transactions between human agents across various degrees of geographical, institutional, and cultural spaces. “Our first task in assessing what kind of currency art might be, or become,” then, he writes, “is to understand the dynamics of its circulation since by definition currencies are constituted through exchange” (3). Joselit identifies two current views of these dynamics, the “fundamentalist” and the “neoliberal.” The former ties the images of art and architecture to a specific space, site, or creative individual while the latter conceives of their status as a token indifferently engulfed by the all-inclusive circulation of goods and services through global markets. It is easy to recognize behind this pairing an underlying political argument that suggests that these are mutually reinforcing positions, with the fundamentalist view of the art-image as a reactive backlash against the nihilistic leveling of the art-image to the status of any other commodity among commodities, its whole value being equated to the price tag it garners in the gallery, at auction, or as a tax-deductible donation to a non-profit cultural institution.

Joselit, as one might expect, seeks a third way between these two antipodes: he embraces the conceptual metaphor of “currency” with a twist, without the implication of reducing art to money. How, then, might the art-image partake in, and even contribute further to the acceleration and rationalization of exchange, without simply becoming a quasi-monetary asset and token of essentially financial transactions?

Joselit’s main response focuses on the effective power of images, which shifts the value proposition for art from a unitary valuation in commodity-terms (or its unitary resistance to monetization, as in the fundamentalist position) to a diverse bundle of force-potentials to produce effects and affects. Joselit’s argument is at root Nietzschean, though mediated through more recent and intellectually fashionable French avatars such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. He puts at the center of the value-economy of circulating images their ability to serve as vehicles of power within networks and on multiple planes, to affect the bodies and emotions of the various recipients and consumers of them, and to produce effects and connections across a variety of contexts on a massive and distributed scale, inscribing themselves over and over across the body of the earth.

Indeed, their function as connective links seems, in Joselit’s account, to be the most important value-mechanism—notably, an “extramoral” form of value, since as Nietzsche famously explicated in The Genealogy of Morals, cruel and violent connections, direct forms of domination and indenture, are also value-producing (even if Joselit himself predictably celebrates mostly socially critical and progressive examples of connection through images). “I wish to look at connection as itself an affirmative object of study,” he writes. “This is what I mean by asserting that there can be a currency of exchange that is not cash, but a non-monetized form of transaction: translation between, for instance, different systems of value, or different cultures” (61). With his argument for images as a currency of human transaction, Joselit refreshes here a long-standing argument for the de-reification of art (indebted to both Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse in earlier art-critical epochs), in favor of an idea of art as an open ensemble of transactional processes of connection, with images serving as the connective tissue.

We should, however, sound a cautionary note that de-reification and the theater of process are always accompanied by their double: Kafka’s “Harrow” (“In the Penal Colony”), a torture-machine for writing the law into the flesh of prisoners, is also a de-reification and a demonetized transaction, in which the value of justice shines, like a radiant flash of gold, from the dying prisoners eyes: “How we all took in the expression of transfiguration on the martyred face! How we held our cheeks in the glow of this justice, finally attained and already passing away!” An intriguing historical point of reference for Joselit’s argument for connection-as-value, interesting above all because it is generally treated in contemporary art criticism as discreditable, is the historical employment of art for the ends of cultural diplomacy—or the subtle anti-communist propaganda—of the United States Information Agency during the Cold War.

Even if, however, this specific instance is disreputable, cultural diplomacy provides Joselit with an important example in which the images of art were made to circulate as tokens of value that were not neo-liberal and monetary but value-laden, ideological and ethico-political, and not only, as the case of abstract expressionist works that traveled abroad shows, because of their explicit “message,” but also and above all because they embodied and aesthetically communicated those value-connotations of freedom, individuality, tolerance, expressivity, and creativity that communist society was said to have suppressed and driven into the shadows. Accordingly, Joselit offers a “modest proposal” to museums that hold vast numbers of artworks, only to keep them in storerooms and vaults, like monetary treasure withdrawn from circulation and even directly serving as collateral in the complex asset portfolios—including collections, real estate, endowment investments, and interlocking relations with corporate and individual donors who have built vast fortunes through finance and other asset management: “We could take image diplomacy seriously and attempt to imagine how art can function as a currency without falling into monetization. This would involve making cultural politics a serious dimension of foreign policy” (21).

Joselit extends this basic argument by proposing an alternative to the beaux-art and modernist notions of medium (preserved even when the artist or critic articulates a rejection of “medium specificity,” as with the conceptual art of the 60s and 70s, or takes up a “post-medium condition” as the starting point of critical or creative work): the concept of format. “Formats,” Joselit writes—are dynamic mechanisms for aggregating content… [F]ormats are nodal connections and differential fields; they channel an unpredictable array of ephemeral currents and charges. They are configurations of force rather than discrete objects. In short, formats establish a pattern of links or connections. (55)His focus on format, in turn, brings in its train a refocusing of artistic image-creation from the production of new objects to new modes of formatting, of aggregating contents in circulation: “what now matters most is not the production of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting” (55-56). He relates this refocusing on format, retrieval, and redeployment of images to the condition of image saturation in the contemporary world and the corollary breakdown of “Art” as a privileged means of disposing over the cosmos of images:

Under the conditions of ubiquitous images saturation, modern art’s purpose as a vanguard for the promotion of and research into how images constitute secular knowledge—and particularly self-knowledge or the anthropological knowledge of others—lost its urgency since everyone who inhabits contemporary visual culture assumes the complex communicative capacity of images to be self-evident. (88)

Under these conditions, art must be seen as a modal difference within the continuum of image circulation, not a fundamental distinction of objects, approaches, or effectiveness—as a view of art, for instance, defined by its privileged relation to certain media, or to a certain special class of “aesthetic” experiences, or to an intrinsic resistance to commodity-status and an inextirpable relation to the residues of the sacred in the modern world, would imply. “Art,” Joselit writes, “now exists as a fold, or disruption, or event within a population of images—what I have defined as a format” (89).

Joselit emphasizes that this condition of “art after Art” is not the “end of art,” a break from it in favor of other spiritual forms, as Hegel would have it, but a modulation—a new modality—of art within the cosmos of images and their embodied values. “After posits continuity and reverberation, rather than rupture,” he writes. “What results after the ‘era of art’ is a new kind of power that art assembles through its heterogeneous formats” (91). He ends on a note of aspiration rather than abandonment, projecting an ongoing critical task of tarrying with art beyond its loss of potency as a culturally privileged form of image-circulation. “One need not exit the art world or denigrate its capacities,” he concludes, “Instead, we must recognize and exploit its potential power in newly creative and progressive ways. Our real work begins after art, in the networks it formats” (96).

Source: https://crosspollenblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/21/the-potency-of-images-reading-david-joselits-after-art/

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mcmansionhell · 8 years

Text

The McMansion Hell Big List of Books, Websites, and Films about Architecture

SURPRISE!!!!

Edit: I had to take out the “Read More” tab because it killed all of my links, so Sorry for the long post!

Hello Friends! I feel as if I haven’t really been giving back to the community as much I should be in these last few weeks, and that while my latest Sunday posts have been mildly amusing, nobody is really learning anything from them.

I shared some recommended reading on my Facebook page a week or so ago, and want to expand on that list here. Architecture is a wonderfully rich field with a plethora of resources. This post is a master-list of the architecture books, blogs, websites and films I have accumulated since my early teens.

While extensive, this is in no way a definitive list, and I’m sure many others will have quite a bit to add on in the comments. I hope you enjoy!

Books

Links are to Amazon. A ** next to the title indicates the link is to an open-source copy of the book, or that it is easily available online.

General Architecture (non-academic, general interest)

Paul Goldberger, Why Architecture Matters

Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

Witold Rybczynski:

Looking Around

How Architecture Works

Home

Matthys Levy/Mario Salvadori, Why Buildings Fall Down**

Mario Salvadori, Why Buildings Stand Up**

Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn

Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House**

Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language**

Bill Bryson, At Home

Matthew Frederick - 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

Architectural Style (Field Guides)

Virginia McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses

If you want to buy one book on this list, I highly recommend this one. It’s the best book out there about American residential architecture. If you’re curious about houses, it’ll sate your curiosity.

Carol Davidson Cragoe, How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architectural Styles (this one is neat for traveling about because it’s small)

John J. G. Blumenson, Identifying American Architecture: A Pictorial Guide to Styles and Terms, 1600-1945 (an old but good small guide)

Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture**

Pevsner Architectural Guides: Introductions [Houses • Churches]

Richard Apperly, A Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture: Styles and Terms from 1788 to the Present

Cities, Suburbs, and Housing (of course not a complete list)

Jane Jacobs:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The Economy of Cities

Cities and the Wealth of Nations

Vital Little Plans: The Short Writings of Jane Jacobs

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City **

Lewis Mumford: The City in History

Aldo Rossi: The Architecture of the City**

Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow

Witold Rybczynski:

Mysteries of the Mall

City Life

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities

Kenneth T Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States

Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier

James Howard Kunstler:

The Geography of Nowhere

Home from Nowhere

Dolores Hayden, PhD:

Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life

A Field Guide to Sprawl

Building Suburbia

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck: Suburban Nation

It’s only fair to put the New Urbanists in here.

John Archer, Architecture and Suburbia (a favorite reference of mine)

Tracy Kidder, House

Sarah Susanka, The Not So Big House

Peter Marcuse & David Madden, In Defense of Housing

Matthew Desmond, Evicted

Alex F. Schwartz: Housing Policy in the United States

Architectural History:

Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (personal favorite)

Francis Ching, et. al. A Global History of Architecture (a standard college textbook)

Carol Strickland, The Annotated Arch: A Crash Course in Architectural History (a lot of fun!)

Daniel Borden, et al. Architecture: A World History

Leland M. Roth & Amanda C. Clark, American Architecture: A History

William J. R. Curtis: Modern Architecture Since 1900 (a classic)

Edward R. Ford, The Details of Modern Architecture

Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History**

Heinrich Klotz, The History of Postmodern Architecture

Charles Jencks, The Story of Postmodernism

Architectural Theory & Criticism Essentials

General Architectural Theory:

Leland Roth, et al. Understanding Architecture: Its Elements, History, and Meaning

Francis Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order** (AKA freshman year of architecture school)

Siegfried Gideon, Space, Time, & Architecture

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space **

Roger H Clark & Michael Pause, Precedents in Architecture**

Mark Foster Gage, Aesthetic Theory: Essential Texts for Architecture & Design

Geoffrey Scott: The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste **

M. Fil Hearn, Ideas that Shaped Buildings** (a great handbook of architectural theory through history - always by my side.)

Lewis Tsurmaki Lewis, Manual of Section (not quite architectural theory, but a super cool book)

Alexandra Lange, Writing About Architecture - not quite theory but a v good and useful book.

Kate’s Top 4 Very Old Dead Guys (all public domain)

Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture

Andrea Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture

Leon Battista Alberti, The Ten Books of Architecture

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture

Modern Architecture

Adolf Loos, Ornament & Crime **(fake summary below):

Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture**

Henry Russell Hitchcock & Philip Johnson, The International Style **

Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age**

Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestos on 20th Century Architecture**

Kenneth Frampton, A Genealogy of Modern Architecture

Ada Louise Huxtable, On Architecture: Reflections on a Century of Change

Current Architectural Theory / Contemporary Classics

Vincent Scully

Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade

American Architecture and Urbanism

Modern Architecture

The Shingle Style Today (this book completely blew my mind in high school, and remains one of my favorite books about architecture to this day.)

Robert Venturi + Denise Scott Brown

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture**

Learning from Las Vegas**

Rem Koolhaas:

S,M,L,XL

Delirious New York**

Peter Zumthor:

Atmospheres

Thinking Architecture

Bernard Tschumi, Architecture & Disjunction**

Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows **

Films

Most of these films have the full version online for free. I won’t link directly to them because I don’t want to get yelled at.

Films About Architects:

My Architect [film about Louis Kahn]

Regular or Super: Views on Mies van der Rohe

Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect

Sketches of Frank Gehry

Frank Lloyd Wright (Ken Burns)

First Person Singular: I.M. Pei

Eames: The Architect & The Painter

Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture

Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner

How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?

Loos Ornamental

Films about Architecture:

Kochuu [film about contemporary Japanese architecture]

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth [about the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis]

Unfinished Spaces [About Cuba’s National Art Schools Project]

Urbanized [about the design of cities]

Visual Acoustics [about the photographer Julius Shulman]

Great Expectations [general architecture]

I’d like to make a shoutout to my colleague Thomas Bena, whose film about McMansions, One Big Home, is making the film circuit now. I’ve seen the movie and will be writing a review on this blog in the coming weeks. In short: go see it if you can!!!

Websites

Architecture News / Popular Websites:

Curbed

Dwell

Dezeen

ArchDaily

Architizer

Wallpaper*

FastCo Design

CityLab

Architonic

Domus

Archinect

Inhabitat

Blogs:

Life of an Architect

Life of an Architecture Student

Build Blog

Soapbox Architect

My Favorite Websites:

99 Percent Invisible (disclaimer: I write for them)

Archinform - an online encyclopedia of architecture

Monoskop - a huge database of amazing archival resources for architecture and design.

Arts & Architecture database

US Modernist Magazine Library - incredible collection of primary sources from modernism

Docomomo (preservation of modernist architecture)

Failed Architecture (analyzing failure in architecture)

Places Journal (my favorite online journal)

Emporis (it has every tall building!)

On Tumblr

Tumblr seems to have killed my links. This is devastating.

Like McMansion Hell:

@uglybelgianhouses - the best, really the best. @terriblerealestateagentphotos

General Architecture: @architecture-drawings @archidrawings @archatlas @archidose @archimaps @archiclassic @architecturalmodels @an-architectural-statement @conceptarchitect @rationalistarchitecture @wherearchitectureisfun @archivemodernarchitecture @luciotuzza @drawingarchitecture @dailybungalow @victorianhouses @ofhouses @architorturedsouls

Modern Architecture: @20cmodern @fuckyeahbrutalism @architectureofdoom @modernism-in-metroland @theimportanceofbeingmodernist @modernistestates @germanpostwarmodern @decoarchitecture @englishmodernism @midcenturymodernhomes @bauhaus-movement @artfuckingdeco @iheartnouveau @sosbrutalism @americanmodern

Postmodernism: @aqqindex @palmandlaser (these two blogs were why I got a tumblr) @memphis-milano @80sdeco @blockygraphics @thetriumphofpostmodernism

Vintage Stuff: @midcenturymoderndesign - mid century modernism @scanzen - an assortment of cool stuff @midcenturyblog - mid century stuff @superseventies - 70s @cardboardamerica -vintage postcards @theswinginsixties - 60s @70sscifiart - 70s Sci Fi Art @driveintheaterofthemind - great vintage blog @80stechnology - 80s tech @imperialgoogie - the 50s @ephemera-phile - old print stuff from various eras @heck-yeah-old-tech - old technology @quadrafonica - vintage hifi @homophoni - also vintage hifi @holespoles - all kinds of stuff @system32dreams - 80s/90s tech @monochrome-monitor - 80s/90s tech @beautifulcentury - 1890s-1910s @oldadvertising - vintage ads @back-then - amazing photographs from history @fifties-sixties-everyday-life - 50s/60s @y2kaestheticinstitute - turn of the 21st century @lpcoverlover - record covers @classical-vinyl - my first tumblr (I comment as classical-vinyl, fyi)

Favorite Architecture Photographers:

@phdonohue @archivemodernarchitecture @archivemoderninteriors @veronicadelica @new-brutalism @wmud

Design/Art/People Who Consistently Post Awesome Things: @archiveofaffinities @zeroing @design-is-fine (one of my favs ever) @c86 @norequeststaken @scavengedluxury (another fav) @99percentinvisible @magictransistor @transistoradio @klappersacks @designstroy @ffactory @instereo007 @contac @publicdomainreview @detailsofpaintings @modernizor @nemfrog @bluecote @graphicgraphic

Visual Artists I Like: @sunday-thought @jimharrisart @jacobvanloon @michaelwardartist

Also shoutout to @maverick-ornithography who is not only hilarious, but who was also my first ever follower, so now I’m returning the favor.

I hope you all enjoyed this post! Next up is Florida on Wednesday, so stay tuned! I’ll finish up Great Britain after that; I’m currently reading books on British vernacular architecture and its history so I’m more informed. I barely dodged some bullets in that last post and had to go back and correct a lot…

Have a great week!

If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon! Tonight, I’m doing a live Discord chat with my $5+ Patrons at 8:30PM EST!

Not into recurring donations? Check out the McMansion Hell Store - 30% goes to charity.

#architecture #design #films #websites #books #further reading #tumblr blogs #art #list

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jessiedicktheword · 6 years

Text

Week 2

This week we presented our presentations regarding last weeks Yemen War work. We also went over modernism and post modernism, and how this is used to in Design, especially typographic design throughout time. My independent study for this week is as below.

Modernism I would describe modernism in design as art/design which aims to defer away from classical or traditional forms, becoming popular in the 19th century until the late 20th century. - Modernism was very much centred around architecture, furniture, and graphics. - Bauhaus design is considered one of the design ideas most synonymous with modernism design, as it shaped many architectural endeavours and it’s own unique modern design style of it’s time (early 20th century). Bauhaus bridged the gap between art and design (specifically industrial design) - Modernism had an analytical, more logical approach to design. Modernism was more directed toward rational rather than flair, and eliminated ‘unnessasary’ features that could be considered ornamental to keep designs true to purpose as well as innovative. - Inspired by science, less is more - Modernism seemed to reject the styles of the previous era, created an idea that previous design could and should be rethought. - Modernism design is essentially the idea of innovation, rethought, improvement and reshaping the environment of the 20th century to create wide scale changes according to a new analytical lifestyle of post World War One.

Post Modernism Post Modernism was a term that didn’t become as apparent in the design scene until approx the 1970s, as it is the practical result of a sudden and dramatic change in what was considered modern. The Modernism building was destroyed in 1972, making for a particularly symbolic destruction of the failed modernism design movement (as far as post modernists believed). Post modernism was all about as much detail as possible to create our own individual conclusions in terms of design. For example, taking a design and going above and beyond, through scale, repetition, collage, colour, saturation to name a few. This describes the ‘pop art’ era. Post modernism was to challenge an audience, make the viewer ask questions and seek interest in the pieces that were being designed. Post modernism showed a new rise in ornamentation, something which modernism restricted. Post modernism was also fuelled by technology being introduced worldwide, as media helped the world be inspired and share interest in post modernist design, unlike before. To most, post modernism was liberating, bringing expression, influencing dynamic and individuality to design. Post modernism is often seen as confusing, but mesmerisingly confusing. It added flair back into modernism design.

The New ‘Era’ of Visual Communication Design From my perspective, the new era of visual communication design is technological. Nowadays, visual communication design is wide spread in terms of variety, as we now have machines and programs to assist designers to create a huge array of interesting and unique things. The sky is the limit in terms of what can be created now, especially in comparison to modernism and even post modernism. We are entering a wave of more crisp, more refined visual designs, which are more often than not targeted toward a specific target audience, whether it be to promote a product, endorse an idea, or create awareness. Visual communication design has almost become more of a competition now. I say this because every visual communication related design is fit for a purpose, or to catch a viewers attention. One design being better than the other for it’s purpose, therefore connecting with a specific audience and promoting a brand or latching itself into that viewers mind.

Modernism

Post Modernism

Source http://tassepatufutsal.com/what-is-contemporary-graphic-design/what-is-contemporary-graphic-design-18-most-important-polish-graphic-designers-of-the-20th-century-printable/https://www.onlinedesignteacher.com/2016/05/graphic-design-styles.htmlhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKomOqYU4MwGreenhalgh reading on stream

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harumi12hirata · 8 years

Photo

18/02/17 Josef Frank @Fashion and Textile Museum

VIENNA — Toward the end of his life, the Austrian designer Josef Frank made dozens of meticulously detailed paintings of houses. Each was in a recognizably Modernist style, usually in a rural setting, with an elegant garden and large windows carefully positioned to capture the daylight. Frank, who died in 1967 at the age of 82, was then living in Sweden, where he was renowned as a furniture and textile designer, but he had failed to replicate his success as a young architect in Austria after fleeing the country in the 1930s fearing Nazi persecution. The houses in the paintings were ones that he longed to build. Frank gave some of the pictures to friends, hoping that they might commission him, but none did. Eighteen of those paintings are now on display here at the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, or MAK, in “Josef Frank: Against Design,” the biggest exhibition of his work in more than 30 years. The show, which runs through April 3, aims to establish Frank as “the great humanist in modern architecture and design,” according to Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, the museum’s director. Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story The co-curators of the show, Sebastian Hackenschmidt and Hermann Czech, an Austrian architect, have amassed several hundred examples of Frank’s work. Starting in his student years, the exhibits include furniture, architectural plans and models, textiles, drawings, those forlorn paintings of unbuilt houses, and three staircases (one of his obsessions) which until now had never been built. Photo The interior from the Villa Beer in Vienna, built in 1929-31. CreditStefan Oláh “Frank is one of the most underrated architects and designers of the 20th century,” Mr. Hackenschmidt said. “His work is impossible to categorize, as he refused to align with any of the design movements of the time, or to develop an identifiable style.” That may have been to Frank’s detriment. His output was bafflingly eclectic, from Cubist-influenced houses to reinventions of Shaker chests and 18th-century English wooden chairs. Determined to use design as a means of enriching daily life, Frank created objects to last and focused on then-unfashionable qualities like comfort and ease in the hope that people would feel relaxed with his designs. Unlike many of his peers, he relished the prospect of clients changing things around to suit their needs. “The house is not a work of art, simply a place where one lives,” he wrote. “Other Austrian architects of the day, Josef Hoffmann especially, believed in the interior as a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk,’ or complete work of art to be preserved intact,” Mr. Hackenschmidt said. “Frank was absolutely against that, and also against the standardization of Modernism, and Le Corbusier’s idea of buildings being designed as machines.” Frank was born in 1885 near Vienna, where he studied architecture. He flung himself into the city’s dynamic design scene in the 1910s and 1920s, becoming a founding member of the Vienna Werkbund, a group of progressive designers. His love of congeniality and spontaneity was apparent in his first design project, the 1910 interior of the apartment of his sister Hedwig and her new husband, Karl Tedesko. Antique furniture and carpets were combined with Frank’s own designs, inspired by such disparate influences as the Italian Renaissance, folklore, neo-Classicism, Biedermeier and Viennese Modernism. He emblazoned the couple’s initials and the year of their marriage on the doors of a series of marquetry cabinets, each of which was light enough to be moved easily. Photo The Brazil pattern on linen, designed in 1943-45.CreditSvenskt Tenn, Stockholm, Sweden The exhibition shows how Frank reinterpreted a similarly eclectic mix of historic influences in the chairs, tables and cabinets he designed for Haus & Garten, a company he co-founded in 1925, and his houses for wealthy Viennese clients. The exteriors of the houses were executed in a conventionally elegant Modernist style, but Frank was more concerned with making the experience of living there as pleasant as possible, for example by carefully studying the natural light in each room and adding smallish spaces with no obvious functions that occupants were free to use as they wished. His work was not limited to the wealthy. Austria suffered from a severe housing shortage after World War I, and Frank emerged as a leader of a group of design activists who campaigned for affordable homes to be built. The workers’ apartments he designed had attractive views, good airflow and abundant light. By the early 1930s, he had sealed his reputation as an influential architect, interior designer and design reformer, but in 1933 with Nazism on the rise, Frank, who was Jewish, made the decision to leave Austria with his Swedish wife, Anna, to live in her homeland. For the next few years, he designed Swedish holiday homes and furniture for a Stockholm company, Svenskt Tenn, while returning regularly to Vienna. But after Haus & Garten was forced to close in 1938, Frank never worked in Austria again. Theater Update Every week, stay on top of the top-grossing Broadway shows, recent reviews, Critics’ Picks and more. Sign Up Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. SEE SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY He and Anna left Sweden for the United States during World War II. Frank taught at the New School in New York and tried unsuccessfully to work on public housing projects. After their return to Sweden in 1946, he abandoned architecture (except in his paintings), and focused on Svenskt Tenn. There, he reinterpreted favorite historic styles again in more than 2,000 pieces of furniture, but he was — and remains — best known for the textiles he designed featuring surreal organic forms in vibrant colors. Seductive though those textiles are, the MAK exhibition makes a case for the importance of Frank’s architecture, not least by showing how elements of his work that were considered odd by his contemporaries, like nostalgia and improvisation, have been embraced by successive generations of architects, including Denise Scott Brown and Rem Koolhaas. His commitment to affordable housing is especially timely given its popularity among young design activists, like the architects in Assemble, a British group that recently won the prestigious Turner Prize for its community projects. “Frank was interested in livability, and the idea of a humanistic architecture that grew with its inhabitants,” said Ilse Crawford, a British interior designer who has long admired him. “His thinking on design was insightful, human-centered and extremely relevant for our times.” Yet Frank regarded his career as a disappointment. “It is not what I had imagined and what I wanted and would have been able to do, but rather only what I was able to accomplish under the circumstances,” he wrote in a 1948 letter to a friend. “When I look back it makes me very sad.”

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alovelyspark-blog · 8 years

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MARCELO JIMENEZ’S TAPES

IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER --- (found in the assignment & the consequence)

ENTRY #16

After months of secrets, subterfuge, and indoctrination, they brought me into their fold. This place is... elaborate to say the least. Despite the modernistic visage, the research they have been doing here seems to date back to over a century ago. This place has history and from what I can grasp, this facility is only one branch of many. Institutions, powerful families; their reach seems grand, and therefore the possibilities for me seem equally as rich. Clearly my own unique methods at Beacon have piqued their interest, and I am most grateful for the opportunity.

Most of what the researchers have been working on, however, seems archaic by today’s stands.

They told me budget is of no concern; results are the only thing that matter. Juggling duties here and at the hospital seems manageable, but Ruben... Comparatively insignificant, but even at his young age his studies are remarkable. Perhaps one day he will even assist me with my work here.

ENTRY #31

After surviving the fire incident and subsequent abuse from his parents, it’s a miracle Ruben can function at all.

His work comes from a place that isn’t motivated by fear or money or social standing... his motives are more... pure. I would say that he is obsessed with the chance to re-live and re-mold reality so he can be with her again.

His scarring is heavy, both physically and emotionally, but he longs for his lost sister.

His love for her borders almost on an incestuous level, but as long as it provides motivation, so be it.

ENTRY #120

His demeanor has turned far too aggressive and his techniques even more perverse. Da Vinci would dissect corpses to further his anatomical studies, but what Ruben has done goes beyond... Demanding his subjects be “aware” as he dissects them to truly see how the mind reacts. He’s more of a butcher than an artist.

But we must remain scientists above all. I had taught him from a young age that the end shall justify the mean, but I could not have predicted things to be this extreme.

Mobius has learned of his involvement, due to my carelessness. I’ve asked they bring him on board to assist in development. Perhaps offering him better facilities and support will refocus him and stave off his gruesome proclivities.

ENTRY #133

Ruben’s experimentation has demanded more and more subjects and, sad to say, they’re suffering as much as - if not more than - his previous patients. Fortunately, Beacon and this city offer no shortage of expendable subjects. I should feel guiltier than I do, but my Hippocratic Oath was abandoned long ago. The scientific and medical potential of the work is too great to be denied.

Mobius has also offered me a respectable amount of... compensation. Promoting me to director at Beacon is not something to be taken lightly. First, however, they want me to have a reputation, publishing studies in various journals. Repurposing some of Ruben’s research towards patient evaluation seems viable. I doubt he will even notice.

ENTRY #154

Despite our powerful benefactors, with this much collateral damage, it’s only a matter of time before people start to take notice.

KCPD has been dropping by. A female officer, I don’t remember her name... Regardless, the police are not something I should be involved with. Mobius says they will take cake of it and make an effort to ensure KCPD leave us alone.

Then there is the report from the Krimson Post, Ivan... something-or-other... He has become a personal annoyance. He barely qualifies as a tabloid journalist, writing cover stories about tales of church sacrifices and other nonsense, but now he’s being persistent about the missing patients claim. I’ll be damned if he is the man who bring Beacon down...

It seems that Ruben could be useful for other forms of problem solving. Perhaps I can interest this reporter in an “exclusive interview.”

ENTRY #188

They grow impatient with our progress and demand briefings on the development process. At first stressing the results, but now they work off of a timeline based on their needs - typical bureaucrats.

I’ve been pushing Ruben, but he’s retreated further, doing his research at home and refusing to come to the lab unless it’s directly working on our STEM prototype. I am feeling uneasy and no doubt Mobius is looking on us with question.

ENTRY #201

Ruben has no idea what he’s done. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t care, either. He was never motivated by fear of Mobius...

The STEM prototype works, but only when connected to Ruben. I’ve checked the details and he customized the whole system to only operate with his own brain-wave pattern. I left him alone with the device for far too long, trusted him too much and despite all my knowledge in the field it’s past the point of fixing. I can’t just flip a switch.

And that’s not the worst of it. They know, as well. I’m not going to take the blame for this. I will drag him here and make him fix it. I can’t imagine what they will do to him if he doesn’t...

ENTRY #209

I saw what they have done to him, and I am appalled. To think the young boy I mentored is now this... a mass of grey matter in a glorified test tube. Could they have been planning this all along?

And what have I become in all of this?

They’ve managed to keep his mind alive by simulating an artificial body. His consciousness is being confined to a mental straight jacket, a gear in their infernal machine. They have even stricken his name and humanity, referring to him by an anagram, “RUVIK.” A crude joke, as if spitting on his grave.

I almost felt the urge to smash the case and end it right there... but my anger was quickly replaced by scientific curiosity. Ruben’s legacy will live on; I will spearhead the next step. I will create something of my own out of this tragedy.

ENTRY #215

They’ve refocused the efforts of the other programs to support our research. STEM priority has seemingly overridden other departments’ individual research. Chemical and botanical studies are focused now on tempering, priming subjects for their inevitable connection.

Now that the prototype is up and running, experiments continue. Upon their return from STEM integration, patients are interviewed extensively. While their particular pathologies inform their experiences, there are commonalities. They all experience the same setting, the same occurrences. The “world” they inhabit becomes larger with every new visitor. This suggests that shard of each user’s consciousness are left behind inside the STEM, creating a community. It’s as if, internally, a new world is being built.

ENTRY #229

Patients emerging from the STEM are becoming more erratic. Their pathologies seem to be amplified by the experience now. Even worse, patients now seem to experience each other’s psychological trauma. It’s as if the user’s deepest fears linger within the encephalon of the system, even after the session is over.

The most concerning thing are their most recent statements. Every single patient claims to see a hooded figure slowly approaching them. Could it be him? His consciousness existing as a ghost in the system?

My curiosity has never been piqued like this. I want to know. I want to see what they see. But it’s too risky... for now.

ENTRY #231

I’m afraid that the fragile mental states of the subjects are limiting our studies. Mobius wants us to move past Beacon patients and on to more “stable” people. They want to get STEM closer to its intended use.

Would they see the world in the same way? Would a “sane” mind weather the psychically draining experience?

I had that dream again. I entered the STEM myself...

ENTRY #232

I revisited the Victoriano Estate yesterday; it’s a vestige, a mere husk of what was bound to be such a home of promise. Mobius reaped nearly everything of value when we took on the research ourselves, but Ruben’s notes indicate he was involved in something else.

There were plans for another STEM prototype... data about using receptors to transmit the brain function wirelessly to unaware users. It’s borderline parapsychology, but these schematics, and the scientific backup provided, seem sound...

What was he planning to do with such a thing?

There’s only one way to find out for certain, but I must continue these experiments in private, away from their prying eyes. I will not let them know... lest they take this from me as well.

ENTRY #239

Something else is even more harrowing... our subjects are... dying. They come out from STEM abruptly passing with looks of horror in their eyes. The one that do survive are catatonic; babbling incoherent masses that we can’t properly interview.

We’ve done nothing to the process to cause this change. It must be the ever-growing collective consciousness of the STEM system. These patients seem unable to take the strain of exposure. We need more “sane” subjects, perhaps to cleanse the system. At its current state, the system is unsustainable, something Mobius will not approve of. This time, only I am to blame for this.

Our new prototype in Beacon is almost ready. When it is, I will start its conversion to the wireless system. Even if the original STEM experiments go awry. I will show my worth to Mobius with its next generation.

ENTRY #246

Today was something truly surprising. He was one of the last groups of test subjects... Just another patient I expected to babble and maybe even die. Patient 105: Leslie Withers.

Ruben had singled him out as a useless subject... but he must have known. He knew I would read his notes. What else was Ruben lying to me about?

But this Leslie... he emerged cognant, calm, and able to report fully what he’d experienced inside. His unique pathology allowed him to successfully navigate his STEM experience with little repercussion.

They know nothing of his existence, but no doubt he is the key. If we all share the consciousness, then with him I too should be able to experience the STEM, potentially even suppress the more unsavory aspects of it.

With him I can be the master of the very technology I helped create. Mobius will see my worth and let me rise even higher in their ranks.

ENTRY #264

They’re coming for me. I don’t know how, but they know everything. They even know about Leslie. There’s no use hiding this anymore.

I’ll enter the system and my return will be proof that all of this was worth it. I can of course convince them that it wasn’t for me, it was for their goals!

There are just the final tweaks left. Once I finish, I will put Leslie in the STEM with myself and activate it. The wireless signal should ring out in the near distance. I can’t speak for those unfortunate to be around, but like I always said, the ends will justify the means.

Finally Mobius will see that I am one of their chosen ones. Ruben is but a ghost. I am their savior. Their plan is nothing without me.

#the evil within #CANON.#SAVE.

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voidingintotheshout · 5 years

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Coronavirus Survival Kit

Introduction / Explanation: Okay, so if you’ve read this far then you’re at least intrigued at getting ebooks that you can read on your phone or other mobile device for free. The following links are on Project Gutenberg. That’s a site that offers no-frills versions of books in the public domain. They have more books than you’ll every read, and many of them are very obscure. Since many of you may be practicing social distancing or quarantine because of the crisis, I thought I would use my English degree to highlight some books from the collection that will entertain or illuminate your lives and will each take up as much space on your phone as a 90-second song or 30-second video—so almost no space.

A Word on the Formats: The two main formats you need to know about are MOBI/KINDLE and EPUB. Essentially, if you’re planning to read the book on the kindle app/device, then you should click/tap on the KINDLE/MOBI link. If you are planning to read it on any other reader app, then you should click the EPUB link. When I say link, that’s the thing that says EPUB and is underlined. Click the link on your device and your device should ask you if you want to open/download it in—well, whatever app you have on your device. How this works on your phone/device may vary, but you’re going to tap/download the book, then tell the phone what reader app is opening this file. Then, boom; you have a free book to read.

Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters: A collection of interconnected tales as told by the dead in a local graveyard. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1280

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2 by Edgar Allan Poe: Contains most of the classics he’s known for: The purloined letter, The fall of the House of Usher, Silence: a fable, The masque of the Red Death, The cask of Amontillado, The pit and the pendulum, The premature burial & The tell-tale heart. A great place to start. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2148

In Morocco by Edith Wharton: A travel narrative of a westerner’s forays into Muslim Morocco in 1917. I’ve only just started it, but it’s so well written. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39042

My Ántonia by Willa Cather: Love & longing in the rural midwest. Nobody paints a picture with words like Willa. Also, she was in the LGBTQ community. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19810

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust: Book One of Remembrance of Things Past. A richly detailed study of place and characters that does require patience, but rewards those with the ability to know a character more deeply than you know yourself. He also was one of the first major writers that wrote about gay life and relationships, based, ahem, on personal experiences. Although it’s worth knowing that this book deals with his childhood where he was a shy, sensitive boy in a very wealthy household. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7178

Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf: An early collection by the queer modernist master. Although more well-known for her novels, her short stories are a great place to start because you can get more of a sense of what themes she comes back to and how she tells stories. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29220

Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave by William Wells Brown: A great slave narrative, and a good one to start with if you’ve never read one. I like that he recounts the events vividly, but journalistically, so it’s up to the reader to pause at the horrors he was all to familiar with. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15132

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: Naturally it’s about a dude traveling in time, but what’s revealed says a lot about how Wells saw the human story evolving. The section about the subterranean species stays with you. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: Aliens come over and kick our asses. Wait, what’s that? *cough, cough* OH NO! IS THAT RELEVANT SOCIAL COMMENTARY?!?! I THINK IT IS!! https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36

Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Man makes a monster out of corpses, but, wait for it—something goes amiss. The great thing about this book/tale is that it can be said to be about so many different things. Mass production, A.I., hubris, nature versus nurture, bad parenting, and/or whatever else you think the monster represents. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84

Pride and Prejudice by Stone Cold Jane Austen: She is, without doubt, the classic author that almost everyone likes more than they think they will. It’s got romance and period drama. Very likable. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A short story about how women are robbed of their free-will by opinionated men to the point that it makes them crazy. So… um… not at all relevant now or anything, LOL. Seriously, a great feminist novella. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1952

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: In 1665 the plague swept through London, claiming over 97,000 lives. Daniel Defoe was just five at the time of the plague, but he later called on his own memories, as well as his writing experience, to create this vivid chronicle of the epidemic and its victims. 'A Journal' (1722) follows Defoe's fictional narrator as he traces the devastating progress of the plague through the streets of London. Here we see a city transformed: some of its streets suspiciously empty, some - with crosses on their doors - overwhelmingly full of the sounds and smells of human suffering. And every living citizen he meets has a horrifying story that demands to be heard. — So, super relevant for today. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/376

Jane Eyre, An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë: Another writer that stands the test of time. If you didn’t read this in school, perhaps you can amuse yourself with this great, doomed love story. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1260

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: The biggest, most bloated adventure story of them all. It’s got prison breaks, pirates, fighting, massive amounts of treasure and a revenge plot that takes literally decades and about eight hundred pages to get through. It’s probably the longest book that you’ll ever fly thorough. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1184

Books to Read to School-Age Kids:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: A slice of life story about a child following a bunny down a hole into a hallucinogenic fantasyland. I mean, who hasn’t this happened to? Very relatable and filled with social commentary that’s still discussed today. Read this and understand the Red Queen Theorem! https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell: My mom’s favorite book from when she was a girl. It’s about a horse. So if your kid loves horses, this is your book. I have not read it, so I have no idea if it has a sad ending, but y’all can learn & grow together / spaced six feet apart. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/271

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biofunmy · 5 years

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Where to Stay, and Where to Eat Noodle Soup, in Ho Chi Minh City

For a place with so much history — decades of wartime and occupation have left their scars — Ho Chi Minh City (still often referred to as Saigon) feels surprisingly new. The metropolis is constantly reinventing itself, and when you consider that the U.S. trade embargo was lifted only 25 years ago, and that the majority of the city’s population is under 35 years old, you begin to understand why.

A short period of overwhelming foreign investment, plus rapid urbanization and a booming labor force, has established Vietnam as one of the fastest growing economies in the world, with vibrant, stylish, youthful Ho Chi Minh City at its forefront. And while increasingly taller buildings continue to reshape the skyline, the city remains firmly in touch with tradition. After all, you can still find the best street-side bowl of pork vermicelli in the city (at the intersection of Nguyen Trung Truc and Le Loi) mere blocks away from a sprawling Louis Vuitton store.

It’s that dichotomy — between a 50-cent scooter ride and a $150 omakase, for example — that has turned visitors into residents and residents into the new business owners who diversify the city’s ever-evolving cultural landscape. In particular, Viet Kieu, the children and grandchildren of refugees who fled the country during the war — the same generation that has led much of the Vietnamese renaissance happening stateside (for instance, the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong and chef Dennis Ngo of the restaurant Di An Di in New York) — are returning to their roots and inspiring contemporary perspectives on Saigonese fashion, food and art. Here, a guide to Ho Chi Minh City’s many attractions.

The Myst Dong Khoi

Located just steps from the 68-floor Bitexco Financial Tower, the soaring beacon of downtown, and Ho Chi Minh City’s main commercial drag, Dong Khoi, the 108-room Myst feels like a much-needed oasis in the otherwise chaotic, noisy metropolis. Tropical plants grow wildly from the balconies inset around the building’s white exterior, while inside, the generously sized, minimally appointed rooms — with touches of Vietnamese craftsmanship seen in hand-carved rosewood benches and ceramic drums — are shielded from the onslaught of honks and horns outside. themystdongkhoihotel.com

Hotel des Arts

Ho Chi Minh City has accommodation options for visitors of every budget, but until the Hotel des Arts opened in 2015, it wasn’t easy to find a boutique hotel with both modern amenities and charm. Built in the style of the grand French Indochine-era institutions described in Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, “The Quiet American,” the hotel sits in the heart of District 1 but feels a world away from the tourists and bustle of the city center. From the hotel’s buzzing Social Club Rooftop Bar, which has some of the best panoramic views of the city, you can get a firsthand look at just how much the neighboring blocks are changing day by day. hoteldesartssaigon.com

Eat

Anan and Nhau Nhau

Nowhere is the convergence of old and new Ho Chi Minh City more apparent than on Ton That Dam Street. Here, vendors of the street market Cho Cu (literally Old Market) proffer fried rice-cakes and produce to the sound of portable karaoke machines, while tucked away at the center of the block is chef Peter Cuong Franklin’s pioneering experimental new-Vietnamese restaurant Anan. On the second floor is the more casual, more boozy Nhau Nhau (which translates to “drink, drink”), a retro-style bar outfitted with old Khanh Ly and Mai Le Huyen records, and ceramic tiles that recall the city’s prewar glory. But that allegiance to the past stops just short of the menu, which features innovative mash-ups like banh xeo tacos and foie gras imperial rolls. anansaigon.com

Traditional Street Food

Anyone with even cursory knowledge of Vietnamese cuisine is aware of pho (and of how readily it can be found in Vietnamese-American enclaves like San Jose, Calif., and Houston), but in Ho Chi Minh City, you’d be remiss not to explore some of the funkier, more complex noodle soups of the region: a crab-and-tomato broth cradling fresh snails and fried fish cake at Bun Rieu Cua Oc (66 Nguyen Thai Binh); the pork rib and Vietnamese charcuterie in clear broth punctuated with fermented shrimp paste at Bun Moc Thanh Mai (14 Truong Dinh); or the dry noodles with wontons and lardons at Hu Tieu Mi Co Giang (176 Bis Phuong Co Giang).

Little Japan Town

Of the many expat groups in Ho Chi Minh City, the Japanese community is the most visible — particularly within the block of alleys known as Little Japan Town (bordered by Le Thanh Ton and Thai Van Lung). A favorite of businessmen and young Vietnamese partygoers alike, the area is the city’s answer to Golden Gai, Tokyo’s famous district of hole-in-the-wall bars, and it’s similarly jam-packed with izakayas, noodle shops and massage parlors. Look out for Tori Soba Mutahiro (8A/A1bis Thai Van Lung), a tiny restaurant that makes a bowl of ramen — the rich, chicken fat-slick broth sharpened with shreds of fresh ginger — that rivals the best in Japan; Mangetsu shochu bar (at the base of the Azumaya Hotel), where you can polish off your yakitori with a pickled plum sour; and Powers (8A/2B1 Thai Van Lung), a rooftop taqueria where you’ll find Japanese skaters and surfers queuing up ’90s hip-hop on YouTube while downing ice-cold pints of Sapporo.

Shop

Hey Camel

At the end of one of Ho Chi Minh City’s most picturesque residential alleys in District 3 lies the ceramics studio and shop Hey Camel. Using traditional Vietnamese stoneware and glazes, the ceramist Leandro Marcelino brings together local materials and techniques with inspiration from his upbringing in the Canary Islands. His collection of vases and mugs adorned with a singular colorful eye, for example, reference both the Moroccan influences of his birthplace and the Cao Dai religion of south Vietnam. heycamel.com

The New Playground

Streetwear defines the fashion in Ho Chi Minh City, and the scene’s epicenter is the underground mall the New Playground, a maze of stores catering to shoppers with a penchant for cross-body bags and neon green. The brainchild of Ryan Son Hoang, one of a collective of young creative people in Ho Chi Minh City who’ve branded themselves 42 the Hood, the complex is worth a visit (even if you don’t need a new harness) just to observe the style-obsessed youth culture. instagram.com/thenewplayground

Moi Dien

For those with a more polished sensibility, the unisex line Moi Dien, which recently opened its first store, offers sculptural silhouettes and playful pieces in drapey, languid fabrics. The line’s founder, Tom Trandt Minh Dao, a Parsons graduate who returned to Vietnam after his studies and working abroad, is one of a handful of up-and-coming designers and brands (Nguyen Hoang Tu and Aeie Studios among them) who are bridging the gap between the country’s rich history of textile production and contemporary experimental fashion. moidien.com

Doan Lo to Sai Gon Tan Thoi at Rubik Zoo

Ho Chi Minh City might not have a defined gay district, but it makes up for it with a host of new L.G.B.T.Q. venues and parties throughout the city. Within its emerging drag show circuit, the Doan Lo to Sai Gon Tan Thoi (or The Modern Saigon) is perhaps the most authentic and uniquely Vietnamese production. Based in the Southern countryside tradition of “lo to,” a form of cabaret starring drag queens, the show centers on a musical bingo game, accompanied by interactive performances — done to by both traditional folk music and modern pop songs — that carefully reveal the winning numbers. Rubik Zoo, 1 Bis Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street

289e

Independent venues for contemporary art are few and far between in Ho Chi Minh City but one of the most exciting new spaces is the self-described “art bar” 289e. The multidisciplinary venue and cocktail lounge is housed within an old tenement apartment on the second floor of a Modernist cement housing block, and hosts weekly film screenings, musical performances and rotating exhibitions. instagram.com/289e.nct

Suoi Tien Theme Park

There is no shortage of beautiful temples and shrines in Ho Chi Minh City, but travel just 20 minutes northeast of the center and you’ll encounter a very different kind of religious monument: the fascinating, at times eerie, Buddha-themed Suoi Tien amusement park. Here, gaudy, oversize sculptures of dragons and neon-haloed Buddhas lead the way to a water park where slides emerge from sages’ beards. The highlight (if you can call it that) is an underground house-of-horrors designed to evoke a descent through a Buddhist hell. suoitien.com

Southern Women’s Museum

Many of Ho Chi Minh City’s streets are named after notable women, and in 1995 the state took a further step in honoring its female citizens and established the Southern Women’s Museum. The institution comprises four floors of relics and photographs relating to the history of Vietnamese women and their impact on the development and liberation of the country. The ground floor is entirely devoted to the ao dai, the Vietnamese national dress consisting of a side-split tunic and trousers, which has been a unifier throughout the country’s rich, and often difficult, history. baotangphunu.com

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momsalt54-blog · 5 years

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A Mutual Bewitchment

NOVEMBER 21, 2018

READING A WRITER’S LETTERS to a beloved friend is the best way to get into that author’s head. Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport were soulmates, deeply devoted to modern art and literature. They were poet-critics — a term Marjorie Perloff fastened to Kenner — “whose books and essays place [them] among writers rather than academic commentators.” (As Davenport described his method: “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”) The bulk of the letters collected in these two compelling volumes are from 1961–’71 — almost two-thirds of the 2,000 pages — with 1961–’66 taking up half. Editor Edward M. Burns has done a monumental job assiduously annotating this vast correspondence.

The crux of their mutual bewitchment occurs in 1963, just as the major American Modernists they revered — Williams, Eliot, Moore, and Pound — start to die off. Though there are glancing references in the letters to contemporary persons and events, such as Vietnam and Nixon, both writers were much more interested in issues of art and poetry — the source of the term “wine-dark” in Pound’s “Canto II” or the films of Stan Brakhage. Pound’s work was a particular obsession (“He was a renaissance,” Davenport stated simply). Independent of each other, both men visited the aging poet in St. Elizabeths Hospital during his 12-year incarceration there and, later, in Italy during his self-imposed exile.

For both Davenport and Kenner, modern painting had fundamentally changed writing itself. They were particularly interested in the discovery of prehistoric cave drawings in Europe, which so deeply influenced Picasso. Davenport, himself a draughtsman, had an ingrained respect for visual art, but Kenner came to this view in his own way. Kenner believed the drawings Davenport did for Kenner’s Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (1962) and The Counterfeiters (1967) were as important as the texts; he tried, unsuccessfully, to get Davenport 50 percent of the royalties for the first book.

Kenner (born in 1923, four years before Davenport) studied under Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto before going to Yale, where at the age of 26 he wrote The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) over the course of a summer break. This book was central to Davenport’s own thesis at Harvard on the first 30 Cantos, delivered in 1961 and published in 1983 as Cities on Hills. A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Davenport came from South Carolina, “having been born into the black Depression and raised in picturesque poverty, homely morals, and love.” The two men met in 1953 but didn’t start seriously communicating until 1961. They visited each other only around a dozen times; in one early meeting, they conversed avidly for 30 hours. Kenner tried to arrange for Davenport to join him at UC Santa Barbara, where he had a teaching position, but the younger writer landed a job at the University of Kentucky, near his family, where he remained for three decades. Already an established writer, Kenner helped secure a reviewing gig for Davenport with the National Review; later they would occasionally review each other’s works. Of Davenport’s 1981 book The Geography of the Imagination, Kenner said: “If having known a man for twenty-five years is to disqualify one from talking about his work, then our literary culture will have to be left to hermits.”

The frenetic pace of their letter writing is astounding, with sometimes two or three letters piling up in a few days before the answers to the originals were written. Some of the letters are long, some stark and confessional, yet all display good humor as well as a unique patois — “Tennyrate” for “at any rate,” “Hahvud” for “Harvard,” “nuvvle” for “novel.” Occasionally one will poach the other’s words, as when Kenner used Davenport’s comment that “[t]hought is a labyrinth” as the final sentence of The Pound Era (1971). Kenner also frequently asks the classically trained Davenport — who brilliantly translated numerous works of ancient poetry — about Greek and Latin meanings. For his part, Davenport usually defers to his more prolific friend, claiming he could hardly call himself a writer compared to someone who averaged a book every two years over a three-decade stretch.

There is the usual grousing about the literary world, especially critics who couldn’t stomach Pound or who couldn’t see the importance of Beckett. They complain about reviewers who attacked them based on all sorts of wrongheaded ideas (e.g., accusing Davenport of being a “cryptoconservative” when he claimed to always vote Democratic). Neither man suffered fools gladly, but they also yearned for recognition. Kenner received the brunt of bad press, including scorn for his supposedly mannered “style,” in which he deliberately aped the style of his subjects. Davenport, more combative but also more sickly (various maladies are bemoaned), struggled to see his fiction (mostly short stories — Kenner dubbed them “assemblages”) skewered by the major critics of the day.

The volumes are filled with little gems of observation, as when Kenner writes that the “whole point of a book is what happens in the five minutes after one has finished reading it.” Secrets are disclosed, as when Davenport tells of how his father died in the hospital and of his admiration for him, despite their differences (“I never ‘rebelled’ and he never coerced”). Kenner responds with mystic wisdom: “To have done his part in making you what you are, and to have so much grown beyond the natural concerns of his generation as to take an understanding satisfaction in contemplating your place in yours, these are two substantial moral achievements for which his memory should be honored.” Later, he thanks Davenport for caring for his five children after his first wife died of cancer, helping him “to realize what an achievement family is: and it is her achievement. They are, singly and collectively, her memorial. Everything perhaps perishes but tradition.”

These letters are also an elegy for a world not dominated by technology, where one had to physically track things down — as in their quest for the copy of Eliot’s The Waste Land that Pound sedulously edited, which occupied them in the early years (it was discovered at the New York Public Library in 1968), or the details Kenner sought from Davenport when the latter retraced Pound’s visit to his childhood home (“What part of town could Pound see from the porch?”). Such dogged modes of research are now in eclipse in our digital world. We can thus be grateful for an editor like Burns, whose scholarship here includes tracing the lost history of Lester Littlefield, a hanger-on of Pound and Marianne Moore, who sent the former books at St. Elizabeths and rented the house in Venice once occupied by Olga Rudge (Pound’s late companion). Littlefield badgered Kenner and Davenport with critical and raving letters, sometimes 40 pages long. Google him and there is barely anything, a stray sentence in a book result or two, but Burns gives him an almost three-page footnote — an internet-resistant epitaph, at least until these volumes are digitized.

From 1979 until Kenner’s death in 2003, there is a large drop-off in the friends’ correspondence — a great mystery, yet the greatest of life: friends growing apart. According to Burns, people who knew both men believe that Davenport’s homoerotic fictions put Kenner off, though as early as 1961, Davenport shared details of his seeking out young men on various trips. He referred to them as “Erewhonians,” from Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, about a utopia where people fear that machines will develop consciousness. Also, Davenport grew more hermetic as he aged, responding to Kenner’s query if he would do a lecture with a steely “Tell your students I do not travel.” Certainly they spoke on the phone, but in those last 25 years, it is almost always Kenner writing to draw his friend out, and often Davenport doesn’t respond — their revels had ended. Did Davenport feel rejected? In the last letter, Kenner writes: “We have been apart too long.” He died 14 months later.

Over the course of their long careers, Davenport and Kenner helped to shape the best ways of reading difficult works of modernist poetry and prose — not only Pound but also Joyce, Eliot, Beckett, and many others. Kindred spirits reminiscent of Emerson and Thoreau, these “questioning minds” were two of the most refined artistic sensibilities this continent has ever produced. Readers can be grateful that their complex friendship has been so beautifully enshrined in Burns’s scrupulous volumes.

Greg Gerke’s work has appeared in Tin House, Film Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, and other publications.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-mutual-bewitchment/

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