inkbluesky

chichen itza maya ruin
Kind of a generic introduction, but great for a quick casual read, Maya architecture

As unique and spectacular as any Greek or Roman architecture, Maya architecture spans many thousands of years; yet, often the most dramatic and easily recognizable as Maya are the fantastic stepped pyramids from the Terminal Pre-classic period and beyond. Being based on the general Mesoamerican architectural traditions these pyramids relied on intricate carved stone in order to create a stair-step design. Each pyramid was dedicated to a deity whose shrine sat at its peak. During this “height” of Maya culture, the centers of their religious, commercial and bureaucratic power grew into incredible cities, including Chichen Itza, Tikal, and Uxmal. Through observation of the numerous consistent elements and stylistic distinctions, remnants of Maya architecture have become an important key to understanding the evolution of their ancient civilization.

From a modern day perspective from someone that appreciates a comfy sofa and a chair with back support, I look at this photo and think how amazing and uncomfortable. It is not just that building techniques and materials have changed since the Maya built this pyramid in the Yucatan somewhere between  514 A.D. and 1194 ( early in the period rather then later). The idea that structures were built without much regard for physical comfort is amazing. The limestone had to be quarreled by hand and took massive amounts of manpower to erect these giant cuts of stone into place. Not so they could lounge around in them and relax afterward or even conduct business in a proficient manner. No it was all done for their leaders and their deities. Other then the refrigerator and the oven the most under appreciated aspect of modern culture and design, is the cushion. It must have been a masochistic culture. At the end of a long hard day you got to stretch out on a hard slab. Sure there is a lot of scholarly intelligent theories as to why maya civilization vanished, but I think life without a cushioned chairs and sofas was  probably the last straw.

Why does the act of performance mean so much to us? Almost everyone reading this cannot imagine life without TV, radio, or movie theaters. We all grew up watching people. Performance Is The Thing  

Romantic aestheticians would have it that art, and by extension, performance, is a heightening of the common human activity of expressing emotions to the point where they are experienced and rendered lucid to the performer and audience in a way that is rarely seen in everyday life. Performance in its ideal expression can even give you creative license to transform what you think is possible. Here I am brought to mind of Martin Luther King. Anybody can have a radical message, but how did King disseminate his message of non-violence and racial equality in such a way that his achievements represent a powerful paradigm shift in the way any self-respecting society views itself? King was a pastor, an orator, an eloquent public speaker. In essence he was a performer; but as a performer he was a visionary who became the living embodiment of his dream. This is what makes him a great performer. A great performer such as King opens the windows of human desire and ultimately shapes attitudes and insights that change cultures.

estuary at sunset larger 

I like estuaries and salt marshes and since we’ve had the classic fall photos I thought this made for a good break in the visual cliche of what autumn looks like.

Ever heard or read the quote “The banality of evil”? Did you know that it was written by political theorist Hannah Arendt? It has come to define what she is and as succinct as the thoughts are expressed in that phrase there was more to her then that. So much more that it is something of a crime that if people can remember who to attribute the quote to they cannot remember the writer’s contribution to American political thought or feminism. A Healthy Dose of Heroine

Still, Young-Bruehl repeatedly and successfully unpacks Arendt’s views of such concepts as action, power, forgiveness, judgment, radical evil, revolution, and the human condition itself. Arendt’s phrasemaking and popularization of notions such as “totalitarianism” developed because she “wanted thoughts and words adequate to the new world and able to dissolve clichés, reject thoughtlessly received ideas, break down hackneyed analyses, expose lies and bureaucratic double talk, help people withdraw from their addiction to propagandistic images.” She persuasively suggests that Arendt’s ideas informed such modern political phenomena as Poland’s Solidarity movement and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and credits her with being ahead of the curve on globalization.

If Young-Bruehl veers toward the reverential and Schor toward the empathetic, both authors take strength and intellectual confidence from their encounters. Emerson hovered over Lazarus, and Heidegger loomed over Arendt. Lazarus shoots darts of inspiration at Schor, and Arendt’s distinctions suffuse Young-Bruehl’s thought. Two ladies with lamps illuminating predecessors so they don’t become mere statues. That’s progress.

From a review of a new book called Why Arendt Matters  (Yale University Press, 2006).

Russia can repel asteroids to save Earth: official

The institute’s specialists are particularly concerned about an asteroid known as Number 2907, a kilometer-wide chunk of space rock that they believe “with a large degree of certainty” will strike the Earth on December 16, 2880.

The entire Soviet empire couldn’t manage to make a good watch for fifty years, but they have the whole asteroid thing under control.

color and lines 

To get away for at least a day from culture and soical issues just a little bit on architecture. It odd how color can give more depth to an object like a wall and lead the eye around and up. The awareness of how color and shapes can be planned to lead the eye of the observer in certain directions is one of the subtle ways that well designed buildings draw us in as observers.

Architecture has played a large though silent role in movies for years. Lived Space in Architecture and Cinema . The photos at the link are from movies that are over fifty years old yet look furturistic. Buildings are there as a kind of motif in the same way that the repetition of some key words are in short stories. The buildings set a mood; if you see a barn or white picket fence you’re probably not about to watch a film that has the pace, the grit of a film where the opeining scene is the front of the Empire State Building. The movies have in turn influenced architecture,

The interaction of cinema and architecture - the inherent architecture of cinematic expression, and the cinematic essence of architectural experience - is equally many- sided. Both are art forms brought about with the help of a host of specialists, assistants and co-workers. Regardless of their unavoidable nature as the products of collective effort, both film and architecture are arts of the auteur, of the individual artistic creator. The relations of the two art forms could, for instance, be studied from a multitude of viewpoints: how different directors depict a city, as Walter Ruttman in Berlin, der Sinfonie der Grossstadt (1927) or Fritz Lang in Metropolis (1927); how buildings or rooms are presented, as in German Expressionist films with their fantasy architecture suspended between reality and dream; over the real architectural projects of these architects of notable buildings. An architect who made superb projects both as a designer of buildings and set designer was Paul Nelson. His project Maison Suspendue (1936-38), a house in which individual rooms are suspended withing a steel-and-glass cage like bird nests, is as fantastic as any of the ideas expressed through the art form of projected illusion. Vice versa, one could speculate on the kind of buildings the wizards of cinema architecture would have built had they not decided to devote their architectural talent to the service of the illusory art of cinema.8

Marcel L’ Herbier, L’ Inhumanite,1924.

Furthermore, we could take the influence of cinema on today’s architecture as our subject of study. Vincent Korda’s visions of multi-storey atria in Things to Come, for instance, have fully materialized, five decades later, in John Portman’s gigantic hotel projects. Portman’s projects are an example of an architecture which cold-bloodedly serves the economic interests of the developer, utilizing means of persuasion deriving from stage sets designed for cinematic spectacles. The thematized architecture produced by the Walt Disney Corporation during the past decade with the help of a host of international star architects, also reverts to the strategy of illusion and seduction familiar from film. But even artistically more serious architecture today often seeks its inspiration and visual strategy from the language of movies. Jean Nouvel, for instance, declares cinematic imagery and experience as a significant inspiration for his architectural work

Its a little stuffy in a scholarly way, but if you can wade through the whole thing little lights of recognition go off, especially if you’ve seen some of the older films that he mentions. I think Metropolis is in the public domain, but I can’t find a download link for it. There are quite a few older films where buildings, shapes, and shadows are  important elements of the film like The Man Who Knew Too Much available for download at the Internet Archive.

taking it all in 

No, this is not me and can you believe the luck its big enough for a wallpaper.

How I Came to Love the Veil

I used to look at veiled women as quiet, oppressed creatures — until I was captured by the Taliban.

In September 2001, just 15 days after the terrorist attacks on the United States, I snuck into Afghanistan, clad in a head-to-toe blue burqa, intending to write a newspaper account of life under the repressive regime. Instead, I was discovered, arrested and detained for 10 days. I spat and swore at my captors; they called me a “bad” woman but let me go after I promised to read the Koran and study Islam. (Frankly, I’m not sure who was happier when I was freed — they or I.)

Back home in London, I kept my word about studying Islam — and was amazed by what I discovered. I’d been expecting Koran chapters on how to beat your wife and oppress your daughters; instead, I found passages promoting the liberation of women. Two-and-a-half years after my capture, I converted to Islam, provoking a mixture of astonishment, disappointment and encouragement among friends and relatives.

Now, it is with disgust and dismay that I watch here in Britain as former foreign secretary Jack Straw describes the Muslim nikab — a face veil that reveals only the eyes — as an unwelcome barrier to integration, with Prime Minister Tony Blair, writer Salman Rushdie and even Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi leaping to his defense.

Having been on both sides of the veil, I can tell you that most Western male politicians and journalists who lament the oppression of women in the Islamic world have no idea what they are talking about. They go on about veils, child brides, female circumcision, honor killings and forced marriages, and they wrongly blame Islam for all this — their arrogance surpassed only by their ignorance.

These cultural issues and customs have nothing to do with Islam. A careful reading of the Koran shows that just about everything that Western feminists fought for in the 1970s was available to Muslim women 1,400 years ago. Women in Islam are considered equal to men in spirituality, education and worth, and a woman’s gift for childbirth and child-rearing is regarded as a positive attribute.

If it sounds like she has been smoking from the pipe of the recently converted I get that feeling too. First point is that that practitioners of Islams just as practitioners of the various sects of Christianity have always managed to rationalize the worse part of their behavior and later deny that those that did things like lynch African American or stone women to death for being raped were not the true believers. That aside it is difficult to believe that a mere veil can cause the downfall of an entire nation. That must be some powerful veil. I hate talking to people that keep their sunglasses on, but they are hardly a barrier to socializing or being socialized. I have to give her points for seeing some western hypocrisy by the very political and social forces that are so adamantly against wearing veils,

And for those who are still trying to claim that Islam oppresses women, recall this 1992 statement from the Rev. Pat Robertson, offering his views on empowered women: Feminism is a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

And in this corner we have Nyamko Sabuni  “Sweden’s new integration and equality minister”, whatever the hell that is, Sweden’s Muslim minister turns on veil 

Supporters of the centre-right government that came to power last month believe that her bold rejection of cultural diversity may make her a force for change across Europe. Her critics are calling her a hardliner and even an Islamophobe.

“I am neither,” she said in an interview. “My aim is to integrate immigrants. One is to ensure they grow up just as any other child in Sweden would.”

Sabuni believes all immigrants must try to become proficient in Swedish — just as she did when she arrived from Africa aged 12 — rather than alienating locals.

“Language and jobs are the two most crucial things for integration,” she said. “If you want to become a Swedish citizen, we think you should have some basic knowledge of Swedish.”

An elegant, vivacious woman who uses subtle make-up and wears soft clothes in pastel shades and tight woollen sweaters, she argues for a total ban on veils being worn by girls under the age of consent, which is 15 in Sweden.

“Nowhere in the Koran does it state that a child should wear a veil; it stops them being children. By putting a veil on a girl you are immediately saying to the outside world that she is sexually mature and has to be covered. It’s wrong,” she said.

Sabuni was born in Burundi. Her father was a political dissident who was in prison during much of her early childhood. In 1980 he was granted asylum in Sweden. The next year his wife and six children joined him and they settled near Stockholm.

Sabuni read law at Uppsala University, Sweden’s equivalent of Oxbridge, and became a public relations consultant. Her husband, who works in the travel industry and runs their home in Stockholm, took paternity leave when their twin boys, now five, were born.

In Sweden she is best known for her suggestion that adolescent girls should have compulsory examinations to make sure they have not been subjected to genital mutilation. “It would enable us to prosecute people carrying out the practice,” she said.

Language is a whole other issue especially to assimilate into a society as far as practical matters like employment and education. She may have a point about veils on very young girls, yet in America various ethnic communities like Quakers and Hasidic jews dress their children in certain ways. Where does it end that line between being free to practice personal freedom and expression, and those expressions being a demonstrable threat to to the entire culture of a country. Some would express this as the clash between the individual and the people. I don’t think it is, but its like a small dispute that the  people like Sabuni, representatives of state authority can flame into something large and symbolic where all sides dig in and refuse any compromise. One distinquishing characteristic of western culture, especially in America has been our ability to preserve ethnic identity and assimilate at the same time. Its been a pretty good trick that has taken us a couple hundred years to get even marginally good at. A veil seems like a small compromise to me. Is the issue of veils the big make or break cultural issue where the Swedes or the British really want to draw the line in the sand.