You are viewing archived posts.
page 5
The Southern Star is in pieces, the Perth Observation Wheel is closing, and now Jeff Kennett is leading a campaign against a proposed ferris wheel in Geelong and the barely-used eyesore on Birrarung Marr:
I can’t stand that Ferris wheel stuck in the middle of it, it’s an absolute eyesore… ¶ The park attracts enough people on its own as they walk or jog along the river, it doesn’t need a man-made piece of Meccano set sitting there for that purpose… Why don’t you go and shove it in an area that’s full of concrete? Take it out of our parks.
Hopefully things are taking a turn for the interesting. Love it or hate it, at least Anish Kapoor’s Orbit isn’t another bloody ferris wheel.
¶
Lovely: “A photo of every painting on display from the painting galleries in the MoMA on April 10, 2010.” ¶ I particularly like the ones that include people — if you want a record of the artwork, buy the programme; if you want a record of the gallery, photograph the visitors. (But look out for mimes…)
¶
Christopher Walken visits his childhood neighbourhood:
He peered through a first-floor window. “This was our apartment,” he said. “Look, it’s still the kitchen! You can see the icebox. The kitchen table is exactly where it was.” He paused. “Oh, there’s somebody there. I wonder if she’d let us in.
¶ Related: Christopher Walken in his kitchen.
¶
Anarchist Tintin — it helps if you imagine he’s from Teesside.
¶
Robin Boyd, multitasker:
In his office, he took advantage of his ambidexterity by writing with one hand and sketching with the other, sometimes while also talking on the phone.
One of the delightful details in Gideon Haigh’s profile of the late, great architect. Boyd’s scathing criticism of Toorak’s Tudor revival is also brilliant:
Decent, honest buildings cannot exist amongst this maudlin riot of half-timbered crenellated erections … scrapped together to make room for the village idiot … The result is a setting which would disgrace a tenth rate comic opera.
¶ Haigh’s article is in The Age (Melbourne) Magazine — unfortunately not available online.
¶
“We want you to be you, not someone else,” Air New Zealand tells its flight attendants — before giving them hundreds of pages of directions about grooming, clothing, speech, sleep and behaviour.
¶
Potency:
We all have evil within us. Even small children are evil towards each other. ¶ Even my daughter could end up ruling Denmark with an iron fist. The possibility is still there. You never know.
Nina Maria Kleivan photographs her infant daughter dressed as dictators. [via]
¶
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Daylight Savings Time is trying to kill you. [prev]
¶
Nowra on Greer, page 42:
I realised then that none of the working-class women who worked with [Nowra's aunt] would ever read The Female Eunuch; it would remain always inaccessible to them with its many quotes from Nietzsche, Blake and Shakespeare.
But by page 46:
Greer’s real talent is as a polemicist. … [H]er ability to popularise complex elements of the Zeitgeist, especially in The Female Eunuch and The Change, is astonishing.
If you’re going to do a hatchet job, at least try to stick to your story.
¶
Paul La Farge contemplates black:
The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, following Aristotle, remarks that the fact that we see darkness means that our eyes have not only the potential to see, but also the potential not to see. (If we had only the potential to see, we would never have the experience of not-seeing.) This twofold potential, to do and not to do, is not only a feature of our sight, Agamben argues; it is the essence of our humanity: “The greatness—and also the abyss—of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness.” Because we are capable of inaction, we know that we have the ability to act, and also the choice of whether to act or not. Black, the color of not seeing, not doing, is in that sense the color of freedom. [...] ¶ The space of refusal is also the space of imagination. You can sit in the darkness for as long as you like, staring blindly at nothing, and see what you will.
¶ Here’s the first issue of Melbourne Black, “a place where the anarchist community can reflect upon the political climate, generate new ideas for action, and share news of current struggles.”
¶
MoMA’s Eleonore Hugendubel tells the story of the museum’s walls:
In the 1930s, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA’s founding director, tirelessly scoured the front and back spaces of commercial galleries, artists’ studios, and museums, … keenly observing display and installation methods. … Barr had MoMA’s walls lined with plain beige monk’s cloth, a cotton fabric that, according to Philip Johnson, who founded the Department of Architecture and Design in 1930, was “the most neutral thing he could get.” … The cloth soon gave way to white wall paint, although in Johnson’s opinion “the beige color was far better for painting than white.”
Decades later, a similar debate occurred at another iconic New York gallery; Frank Lloyd Wright was furious at the proposed colour for the Guggenheim’s walls:
S.O.S.! … A picture-hanger (named Sweeney) is authorized … to barge in on the architect of the museum and paint the interior dead-white – thus tearing the inside from the outer walls of the organic building. … ¶ A pity to have a masterpiece (it is) daubed to death at the end to gratify a metempsychosis for the white-sepulchre for a museum.
Watching paint dry is not so dull after all.
¶
Owen Hatherley explores an elseworld Britain in which skyscrapers were embraced; a daring and imaginative skyline that was dreamed but never built:
Yet more precocious was the proposal for a pyramidal skyscraper which would, fittingly enough for the Victorian metropolis, be a tower as necropolis, its 50 or so storeys housing the bodies of as many as 5 million Londoners, slotted into a fittingly protomodernist cellular structure. It was presented before parliament, and passed over for the somewhat less demented Kensal Green cemetery.
¶
Language is enriched when it incorporates slang, neologisms, immigrant inventions and street talk that say things that were never needed to be said before, or that we were never willing or able to say to each other. Language is corrupted when it is made bland, vague, superficial, flabby or meaningless.
Frustrated by the phrase “world class”, Renny Pritikin makes a neat point about language. This is something I want to keep in mind whenever I write. [via]
¶
I just found out the Avett Brothers are coming to Melbourne — I am giddy with anticipation.
¶
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
MeFi — nonmyopicdave — East of the Sun, West of the Moon
¶
Crikey‘s Bernard Keane reminds us that the Opposition’s (and the media’s) purported concern for endangered workers is a recent phenomenon:
[The Howard Government] severely limit[ed] the circumstances in which union officials could act on safety issues, or in which construction workers could take industrial action over safety issues. ¶ The only problem was that safety was not merely a pretext for union activity. Construction is up with road transport and mining as one of the most dangerous occupations in the country. And following the imposition of Andrews’ legislation and the extension of the building industry code, deaths in the constructions industry increased massively, from 3.14 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2004 to 3.86 in 2005, 5.6 in 2006, 4.48 in 2007 and 4.27 in 2008. [...] ¶ Despite clear warnings to the Minister that the changes would endanger safety, there was no media outrage or claims of a debacle. Indeed, in mid-2007 The Australian was lauding the Government’s reforms. The only mention of safety by The Oz was to note that fewer days had been lost due to “abuse of occupational health and safety issues”. More dead workers didn’t get a mention.
Dangerous industries need strong unions — not WorkChoices II. [prev]
¶
The latest OK Go video clip features far and away the most impressive Rube Goldberg machine I’ve ever seen. ¶ Previously, Cadbury.
¶
I don’t really know how to adequately describe The Maria Bamford Show, but it is hilarious. [via]
01 — 02 — 03 — 04 — 05 — 06 — 07 — 08 — 09 — 10
11 — 12 — 13 — 14 — 15 — 16 — 17 — 18 — 19 — 20
(And don’t miss her One-Hour Homemade Christmas Special.)
¶
Colorbind is a join-the-dots puzzle game for iPhone — simple, elegant, beautiful. It feels like Upon a Fold and Eliss had a baby. [via]
¶
