#ACCIDENTALLY INVENTED CUBISM

[manicpixiepowerbottom]

If you smoke and you’re around non-smokers, don’t smoke. If you don’t smoke and you’re around smokers, find something to do with your hands. Don’t recount dreams, unless they can be condensed into one sentence. When telling stories about people you barely know, have met once, or invented—refer to them as your “friends.” Buy a round of shots. Buy two rounds of shots. Memorize jokes. Nod your head, but not too vigorously. Keep your mouth open and slightly smiling. Are you chewing gum? Keep your mouth closed, avoid smacking sounds. Slouch artistically, not lazily. This is done by making sure your neck doesn’t follow the line of your spine. Adjusting your pants too much will make you look suspicious. Point to the left and exclaim “Oh my god,” then pull them up quickly while no one is watching. When people ask what you saw, say “I thought someone was getting robbed.” Avoid wearing too much denim. Keep dental floss in your purse. Do not scream when bees zoom past your ear. Do not scream at the post office for no reason. Do not scream in the Arby’s drive-thru line when you realize that not only will you die alone, you’re no longer hungry. Be open about your personal life, but do not accidentally tell the story of how you drank two bottles of wine and awoke on the kitchen floor to the smell of burning noodles on the stove. Limit your drinking to one night a week, unless you are with other people. If you notice you haven’t showered in six days or left your apartment in four, take a shower. After your shower, fall asleep for twelve hours. When people ask where you’ve been, say “Mexico.” Do not be alarmed when your cell phone dictionary does not recognize words like “breakdown,” “clitoris,” or “antisocial.” You shouldn’t be sending text messages containing these words, anyway. Have a mental reserve of pronouns to use when you forget people’s names. None of these pronouns should include “asshole,” “jerk-off,” or “dad.” Do not write letters to the man you lost your virginity to. Do not write poetry. Follow an attractive stranger on the street. Photograph the back of his head with your cell phone. When a group of girls are standing around you talking about their relationships, interject phrases like “I hate that,” “Oh no,” and “I know, right?” Talk about your relationship, even though you don’t have one. Say “He never calls me, I always have to call him. It’s so annoying.” Show them the photo of the back of the stranger’s head. Say “His parents are from Tibet. He thinks photographs steal little pieces of people’s souls, but he let me take this one. You know, for as much as the little things frustrate me, we really have something special.” Blush. Know about history and politics. Read about music. Read about current events. Take notes. Memorize them. Get interested in something. Hiking. Sushi. Cubism. Exude “Take me skydiving with you,” not “Milk makes me gassy.” Do not lose focus in the presence of others—you might repeat yourself or laugh inappropriately. Carry a small, heavy rock in your pocket. Grip it firmly when you feel yourself drifting away.

Megan Boyle’s “How To Make Friends And Convince Them You Are Someone Fun And Not Insane And Worth Inviting Next Time”

[andersonsallpurpose]

The Adventures of Picasso (1978) feat. a young Gösta Ekman and his face: in which the starving young artist accidentally invents cubism.

ETA: I just realized someone subtitled the pan-european pidgin in this clip. Only in swedish though, so the rest of you will still be appropriately confused.

[radioleary-blog]

Burning Flags and Hosing Native Americans

11/30/16

"Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag," Trump wrote this week, after a college student in New Hampshire burned a flag to protest the election, "if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!"

This from the guy who called for registering Muslims and imprisoning his political opponents. “If these people don’t like things the way they are, they shouldn’t burn the flag, they should do what I did, and burn the Constitution!” Trump said, “You think I could get away with all the crazy shit I have planned for this country if I just burned a flag? No way, I’d be in a prison cell right next to Hillary. So the Constitution had to go. You say flag burning is protected by the First Amendment? Let’s get rid of it. Shoot the First Amendment with a gun from the Second Amendment. A Bill of Rights? They sold you a bill of goods! It’s a Bill of Wrongs, folks, that’s all it was. A Bill of Wrongs.”

Trump released his statement through what has become the official White House press briefing source: Twitter. Oh, he loves his Twitter. Probably because 140 characters is just about the upper limit of his attention span. And 140 characters is the perfect length for saying something stupid, and saying it loud. With a lot of exclamation points!!! Trump loves Twitter because he knows he never has to provide details or logically support his arguments in 140 characters. Of course, he couldn’t support most of his bullshit with logic if he spent ten years writing them into a Russian novel. Hmm, I wonder, what would the title be of a Russian novel written by Donald J. Trump? “The Gulag Mara Lago” ? “One Day in the Life of Ivanka Denisovich” ? “Abortion: Crime and Punishment” ? “War and Pussy” ? Actually, Napoleon plays a prominent role in “War and Peace”, and Trump reminds me a lot like Napoleon. Except Napoleon’s hand is always thrust into his shirt, whereas Trump’s hand is usually thrust into a woman’s pants.

And Trump’s other hand is always on Twitter. And since he’s limited to 140 characters, the Donald doesn’t even have to demonstrate he understands the issues he’s tweeting about. Trump somehow manages to always tweet with the same grandiose level of outrage, bluster and threatening huffy-ness on absolutely any topic, especially when he has no clue what the fuck he’s talking about. Just try him, on any topic:

@surrealDonaldTrump:  “Quantum Theory? It’s a hoax invented by the Australians! Scott Bakula is a great actor!! Why no Oscar, academy? Shame!!

@surrealDonaldTrump:  “Picasso and Cubism? There must be penalties for (so-called) artists who support Fidel Castro’s ideas! Cubism!! And only 90 miles from our shores!

@surrealDonaldTrump:  “Handel’s Messiah at the Met? No gingerbread house! No scene where Handel and Gretel get cooked in the witch’s oven? The Met got it wrong!! Boring - cut funding!!

Of course, what he’d really like to do is get the whole Constitution down to 140 characters or less:

@surrealDonaldTrump:  “We/ people -perfect union, just perfect!! More guns- 2 Corinthians. lower corporate tax rate!! No illegal alienable rights- a selfie evidently: life, liberty, etc.”

Trump is the first Twitter President, but he’s also the first internet troll President, and that’s what’s scary; that a man who is always so angry and eager to get into a Twitter war is now able to get us all into a very real war just as fast, and just as furious. The fast and the furious, or maybe the fascist and the furious. What keeps me up until 3 AM? Worrying about what the hell Donald Trump is up to at 3 AM! He gets up at 3 AM not because he thought of something brilliant to say that couldn’t wait till morning, but because he has to pee twenty times a night. He’s not having a “Eureka!” moment, he’s having a “urea” moment. Because no matter how rich and powerful he is, he’s still an old man, with an old man’s prostate and bladder that are just about as worn-out and unworkable as his economic policies. And both his bladder and his economic plan rely entirely too much on a “trickle down” theory that never, ever provides any relief.

So he wakes up every night in the middle of the night, mad at the world and fully capable of any act of irrationality on Twitter. And now, on the world stage. I’m afraid I’m going to wake up one morning and find out we’ve been at war with China for five hours already. I can see the Joint Chiefs of Staff pleading with him, urging him not to go to war, “Mr. President, we can’t risk a nuclear confrontation, it’s madness! The stakes are too high!” To which Trump replies, “Wrong, General, my steaks are very reasonably priced! Believe me. Very high quality steaks.”

Then our military leaders would be begging him to stop the war. “Please Mr. President, there are 1.2 billion Chinese with a standing army of 200 million men! Our troops are being decimated! We told you hours ago to give the order to retreat! If we are to survive as a nation, you must give the order to retreat!” To which Trump replies, “Wait, you said ‘retreat’? My bad. I thought you said ‘retweet’!”

“But seriously, General, we should retweet. We can still win this on social media.”

Hosing Native Americans

I’m deeply disturbed by what’s going on with the DAPL. To us that stands for Dakota Access PipeLine, but to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, it stands for Damn Americans Plundering Land.

Now I’m a big fan of oil, a really big fan. Fossil fuels? Love them so damn much. They keep me from freezing to death every winter, when New York state turns into the planet Hoth from ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ for five months. More like ‘The Empire State’s Back: A No Hope.’ And even those giant Imperial Walker “AT-ATs” moved a hell of a lot faster than Northway traffic in winter.

So I love oil. I loved dinosaurs as a kid, and now that they’re fossil fuel, I love ‘em even more when they’re driving my ass around in my car. So I understand why we usually look the other way while the robber barons take the land to take the oil, and play the villain in this never-ending Western horse-opera that keeps our lights on. We usually don’t really care that there’s never a Lone Ranger to ride to the rescue and shoot the gun out the villains hand, we’re willing to let the good guys lose if it keeps our cell phones charged. And hey, how the hell did the Lone Ranger always manage to have a non-violent resolution to every conflict...by using guns? I don’t think he ever killed anybody, but he was always shooting and waving those guns around like a guy with flashlights on a runway waving in a 747. It probably was less of a moral stance than the fact that silver bullets were ridiculously expensive. But this really painted an unrealistic expectation for an entire generation of TV-watching kids; that hostile confrontations are more likely to be resolved peacefully once you break out the guns. Everything will be just fine! What could possibly go wrong with teaching kids that random gunfire solves most problems?

And The A-Team? They were an even worse example, they fired guns all day long and nobody ever got hurt. Every episode, the A-Team ended up in a ten minute shoot-out with machine guns at close range, and they still never managed to successfully shoot somebody. These guys were supposed to be ex-military? What branch, the Kiss Army? They must have fired ten million rounds of ammunition over five seasons, but they never managed to kill a single goddam bad guy. Not even accidentally. You’d think someone would at least get hurt tripping over the mountains of spent cartridges. No one ever got seriously wounded or maimed, either. Never a realistic depiction of the awful consequences of close-quarter machine gun fire on the human body. Never a bad guy laying there screaming at the end of the episode, writhing in a spreading pool of blood, desperately trying to cram his intestines back into his body as the A-Team smoke cigars and high-five each other in a freeze-frame over the closing credits. No, when the show was cancelled the body count was still zero. No wonder these guys were kicked out of the military, they were just wasting valuable ammo and helicopter fuel! I guess B.A. stood for Bad Aim. Was it poor eyesight? I think maybe they called them The A-Team because that was the only letter they could read at the top of the eye chart.

But I digress. Back to the pipeline. So the oil companies dig and bulldoze, raze and deforest, drill, lay pipe and pump. That’s where the oil comes from, and we write it all off as Progress. Although, in all fairness, “drill”, “lay pipe”, and “pump” is also where orgasms come from, so let’s not rush to judgement.

The DAPL is a 1,172-mile, $3.8-billion pipeline, which would transport up to 570,000 barrels of oil a day. It’s nearly finished except for a section scheduled to go under the Missouri River. Native Americans of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe are protesting the pipeline, saying any oil spill will contaminate water sources that serve over 17 million Americans. So last week, authorities attacked the tribe with water cannons in sub-freezing temperatures, which put 17 protesters in the hospital. You think we’ve really advanced as a society? In 400 hundred years of Native American relations, we’ve only gone from intentionally giving them smallpox, to intentionally giving them pneumonia. Slightly less life-threatening, I guess, but not a big improvement. Who knows, maybe in another hundred years we’ll only intentionally give them a head cold. Not a bad one, but one that may cause them to call in sick to work and lay in bed all day catching up on TV.

Authorities defended their use of the water cannons. “We warned them repeatedly,” Morton County Sheriff ‘Buffalo Bill’ said at a press conference, “It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again!” Sheriff Buffalo Bill then tucked his penis between his legs and tweaked his nipples for the remainder of the press briefing.

And do we truly appreciate the sheer fucked-up-edness of using water cannons on people who are protesting to protect water? What Federal Agency was behind this? Did they call in the Bureau of Irony Enforcement? What was the plan, was this psychological warfare, to hose the Native Americans until they say, “You know what? Fuck water. I’m going back to the casino. We have towels there, and our odds of winning are better.”

This is like, say, if there was a protest by PETA, and the police came to break it up by throwing cats at them. “This is a legal order to disperse!” Raawr! “You must leave the area immediately!” Mrowwl! “Sir, the protesters are deploying countermeasures, they have balls of yarn!” “Hmm...get me that big tomcat named Pepper, we’ll see how they like it when he sprays!”

This whole situation shows that we as a people can no longer effectively stop large, powerful corporations like the oil industry from doing whatever the hell they want to us and our land. They determine public policy, and they have lawmakers and law-enforcement to back them up. They aren’t even afraid of lawsuits and litigation from this tribe, and this tribe is called the Sue! Sure, they spell it ‘Sioux’, not ‘Sue’, but everybody knows the Sioux were the most litigious of all the tribes. The Apache were the most renowned warriors, but the Sioux were legendary litigators. Man, they were a formidable legal opponent. Their raiding party would ride silently into settlements under cover of the night, and as the settlers awoke, they would hit them all at once...with subpoenas.They were ruthless; issuing restraining orders, ‘cease and desist’ orders, and injunctions (I think that’s actually where the offensive slur injun comes from; injunction).

Then they would tie them up. In court. For years. Led by the great Sioux warrior, Red Tape. They still talk about the greatest Sioux leader, Chief Council, and his partner in the firm, Running Billable Hours. The Sioux were the tribe that successfully negotiated a class-action settlement against the Iroquois League over faulty tomahawks, and they are the tribe that got the zoning variance for the Grand Canyon. They were also, by most accounts, the nation’s first litigators to use peyote to consult a Spirit Guide during jury selection, but Alan Dershowitz later perfected the technique. It’s sad how little of this you learn in school these days.

But take heart! As I write this, an estimated 2,100 U.S. military veterans were bound for the frozen Standing Rock reservation to aid and support the Sioux and their allies battling the oil baron villains. Maybe I was wrong, it looks like there are a whole hell of a lot of Lone Rangers riding to the rescue. Of course, Tonto was really running the show.

If anyone was offended by any of this, please don’t Sioux me.

[wagihyoussef]

Architecture and the Desire for New Form and Expression

Abstract

In some historical periods, individual architects concentrate on the human figure, others on objects connected with utility and consumption, others on nature. They find that under certain conditions form is influenced by concern with, or neglect of, detail.  The dependence of form factors such as size, proportion, location, shape, shading, direction, is being studied. Visual form is also considered to articulate the environment.  Visual order as a tool of insight has been stressed in the formal aspect of architecture.  Beauty can be defined as the correspondence of meaning and perceptual symbolism.  Things that belong together are shown together, and what is great and high appears in large size and in high location.  Beauty is lost when meaning and form are split.  This results in compositions which carry no message.

Keywords: cubism, mannerism, Romanesque, gothic revival, modern style

Introduction

Art cannot be a physical fact because physical facts have no reality.  This means that art exists only as a psychological experience, and the forces which generate such experience are the proper object of our attention.  In architectural design if one should put something haphazardly, one should be compelled to redo the whole design over again, starting from that place. The psychological forces that determine architecture form operate essentially in the perceptual process of vision and in the area of motivation and personality. Also, a more complete presentation would require consideration of future psychological levels, notably thinking and memory. Vision cannot be explained merely by the properties of the object but is dependent on what goes on in the brain.  If we scrutinize the observer's experience and consider at the same time what is going on in the neural mechanism of vision, we realize first of all that we are dealing with a highly dynamic process.

One must realize that all visual form is constantly endowed with striving and yielding, contraction and expansion, contrast and adaptation, attack and retreat. One can understand the elementary impact of a building and its capacity to symbolize the action of life by means of physically motionless objects. The sensations of push and pull are the conscious counterpart of the psychological processes which organize percept in the neural field of the optical sector, that is, the cerebral cortex, the optic nerve, and the retinae of the eyes. Accordingly, visual dynamics is not a secondary attachment of the stimulus, due to accidental, subjective associations, but rather precedes the geometric pattern of shape and color in that this pattern is the result of the organizing forces of whose activity the observer is partially aware.

The Colonial Style

Around the 17th C. the architecture in America was Colonial and dependent on England, Spain, Portuguese and sometimes France. But their dependence was not complete, and the aesthetic values were not provincial.  Some of the motifs were due to Spain and Portuguese whose precedent were the Indian workers to whom was related the Decoration of the Aztec and the Temples of the Inca.  Afterwards the client and the builder were from the West and the differences which were reflected upon architecture were due to the environment.  The Colonial style in North America was Georgian English and was executed with wood which made the columns thin and helped the use of painting.  The hot climate admitted the introduction of terraces, porches, loggias and the ample spaces.

Classic Styles

The National style in America was the Greek revival. Thomas Jefferson was enthusiastic to the Roman ruins which he had seen in 1780 and the result was a style ranging from the imitation of Palladianism and the Roman details as seen in the University of Virginia. From 1850 the American Architecture was not Colonial.  Instead there was Greek revival, some of Gothic, Egyptian, and a revival of old English Cottage.  Some of the buildings which had original motifs are the State Capitol and other two buildings which were conceived as the combination of the forms of the Greek Temples with central domes (Davis and others).  Davis invented a truss for wooden bridges.

In France and Germany, they evolved the Romanesque style.  In the Ile de France the master masons created the Gothic style, but the English builders, the Spanish, the Germans, the Italians have made some changes to that style to conform with their national consciousness.  Afterwards Italy switched to the Early Renaissance, the High Renaissance and the Mannerism. All this happened before any building with a Western character was built in America.  But if we take the whole of the United States we might find some echoes here or there like the ribbed Vault in some of the Friars Churches in Mexico which is Western Gothic. Apart from this Mannerism was the first European style which was reflected in America.

Modern Style

America introduced the Balloon frame in 1825 which was an elementary system for wooden buildings which has prefabricated parts to be gathered without profession in the site, the evolution of the iron structure for domestic buildings and the warehouses.

Henry Hobson Richardson. Henry Hobson Richardson 1838-86 believed in the French Romanesque, but his work was exceptional.  He used it with new qualities when he brought it out by the use of elementary forms.  He had a feeling of texture and surface. He made rich patterns to underline the massive compactness of his buildings. His work influenced many architects of his time such as Sullivan and Adler. By Sullivan America reached the top in architecture creativity. Chicago became the International Center of modern architecture and an original idiom worked out by Sullivan and his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright.  No European country had such buildings as those of Wright to compare them with.

After the First World War, there was a style made by great imaginative and decisive men. These men preached and ventured the unexplored. What they have done was according to the needs of the new society and the individual condition of the architecture.  The new style refused to accept craftsmanship and whim in design.  It is characterized by sheer surfaces and the least ornament so that the parts could be produced industrially.

Mies van der Rohe. The steel, glass and the reinforced concrete did not dictate the new style, but they belonged to it. Mies van der Rohe designed a memorial for the Communists in a cubist expressionist manner.  The sweeping lines of Mendelsohn’s architecture was extensively imitated.  Even the glass wall of Mies's skyscrapers had a fantasy which was not found in the early work. His concern about the skyscrapers was the reflection of a general fascination in America expressing the daring of the Country.  In those years it was seen as a sign of Romanticism more than a rational frame of mind.

The interaction between the interior space and the exterior was discovered by Frank Lloyd Wright in America.  The belief in exposing steel members instead of concrete massive blocks characterized the best works completed after 1930.  The best of these is the Barcelona Pavilion in 1929 by Mies Van der Rohe who was born in 1886.  Its walls were constructed of glass and dark green marble and a white straight ceiling.  The interiors were wholly opened with steel brilliant columns and divided by screen walls. It had monumentality because of its splendid materials and noble spatial rhythm.

Le Corbusier. Some of the Pioneers have made some remarkable works out of them. Le Corbusier; he was a painter and was influenced by Cubism though he did not accept it completely. In the pavilion of L'Esprit Nouveau in Paris exhibition of 1920 he admitted a tree to stand in the middle of the house and to extend through the roof. He built also in the University City of Paris a Swiss Students' Hotel 1930 with random rubble which appears side by side with glass and concrete and plaster.

Walter Gropius. Walter Gropius made the Bauhaus in Dessau and some blocks of flats. The Bauhaus was built in 1925.  It consisted of a middle part combined by differences of height.  The total form was like two "L"s overlapping.  The middle part consisted of two stories for offices over supports. Attached to the left were the four stories of the craft school.  In the South a wing contained the Auditorium and the canteen.  From this end was a tower of six floors for the dormitory with small balconies.  The all-glass workshop extended from the other end.

The Religious buildings remained far from this movement, but in Switzerland modern churches appeared such as St. Antony's Basil by Karl Moser. The problem was less complex for the reformed churches of Switzerland than others. Asplundh made the Crematorium for Stockholm 1935 and succeeded in achieving comfort.  The advance to the portico with its verticals and horizontals, the free Cross standing isolated from the building and the Chapel in the interior and the waiting room are intricate and soothing. It was surrounded with lawn on rising land, trees and a pool. The architecture of the 20th Century was not so artfully combined with the landscape.

Cubism

Cubism was criticized as being the style of cigar boxes, lacking the grace and lacking the fullness and in short inhuman.  But no one denied its functional merits.  It was said that, that style is good for factories and nothing else.  The religious building did not follow that style for those reasons.  But Nervi's Hall, Morwit's Raleigh Arena were not cigar boxes nor hardly had any mechanical appearance, not lacking fullness or grace. It could be looked at as industrial more than individual. But they looked organic not crystalline, and personal and anonymous. These forms have been made by men who wanted to span spaces and a desire for new form. The desire for new expression created new forms and found new technical means to express it.  But the roofs of the later years which curve up or down were not due to functional consideration and costs, but they were as Nervi called them ‘structural acrobating’ and the motif was difficult to calculate or construct.

Revolt against Reason

In Brazil they advocated the most fabulous construction.  The church of Niemeyer in Pampulla 1943 which had a parabolic section in the Nave and the small transept is in the form of parabolas, and the square tower which begins thin and increases in height, and the plan which contracts and expands in free curves do not depend on function. Brazil was not revolting alone against reason, but Le Corbusier was influenced by what was in Brazil, for he changed the style of his designs after visiting it. His Ronchamps in Paris 1955 explains this. The roof was shaped in the form of a hat or a mushroom and lighted by many small windows which were shaped randomly and laid so. The church is small, with a capacity for only 200 persons and was built in concrete.  When I visited it in the 20th Century 1962, I felt it seemed moving. 

The revolt against reason was not only by Le Corbusier but also appeared in many countries.  In England the architects used geometrical shapes for walls, and balconies.  A façade which has a homogeneous balcony for the flat was arranged such that the supports were put in a way to appear as a checkerboard.  Or the balconies may interchange between massive concrete and iron grids to give this impression. In Italy too, Luigi Moretti (1909) made the narrow end of the upper eight or ten floors cantilevered to the front over the ground floor.  This is so because in the matter of aesthetics the eye is the judge.  This is why Ronchamps had to come.  Examples of these tendencies are the United Nations in New York and the Lever building by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill.  It has a contrast between the 24 stories of glass-slabs and the two stories buildings underneath with its closed piazza in the interior.