Month: May 2013

Dressing The Air digs up a short film by Alex Roman:

Entirely built and rendered on computer, this impossibly controlled journey around Louis Kahn’s Exeter Academy Library evokes the soul of the architecture with very particular attention to material and light. Roman is managing to distill more into these digital “fictions” than most photographer/filmmakers manage from encounters with actual built structures.

From an interview with Roman:

I find inspiration in the aesthetics of the fine arts; specifically painting, but even something as varied as architecture. For technical reference, I find inspiration in still image photography for static renderings, and TV and film for animation.

A shot from the making of the film here.

Prospero pans the 2013 Met Ball, designed to celebrate the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition “Punk: Chaos to Couture”:

It was a silly idea to begin with. Doing punk through the clothes is like trying to do hippiedom with peace symbols. Punk was never about the threads. The clothes, the hair, the makeup, the sewn-on patches and the badges conveyed a message about who you were and what you stood for. For those who were not interested in punk’s message, the clothes served as a warning. But punk was always more than a fashion statement. …

To look at punk viewed only through the attire, rather than the beliefs, is to make a cultural error. Punk wasn’t “chaotic”, as the title of the Met’s new fashion exhibit suggests. Some punks were anarchists, but anarchy and chaos are not synonyms. The anarcho-punks believed that an absence of government would produce harmony. They were libertarians who believed in personal freedom and individualism—a bit like Texans, but unwashed and smelling of petunia oil. An exhibition that juxtaposes the idea of chaos and punk makes it appear that punk was about nothing. The establishment often undermines youth movements this way. Dismissing them as incoherent is easier than answering angry questions.

Or maybe, as Morgan Meis argues, “Punk was about fashion from the beginning”:

The bored, blank stare of the punk rocker can be seen most clearly in one other place of popular culture: the catwalk. … Punk was important not because it was more than a fashidon, but because it was the soul of fashion. In exploring the dark side of fashion it explored the dark side of modern life … Usually we don’t have the strength to take a good look at our empty, death-driven culture. For a short time in the 1970s, punk rockers did just that. Then they died. Literally or figuratively.

(Photo: Paloma Faith attends the Costume Institute Gala for the ‘PUNK: Chaos to Couture’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 6, 2013 in New York City. By Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for People.com)

Ta-Nehisi reflects on his recent experience abroad as a novice French-language student in his mid-thirties:

I stayed with a host family and took my dinners with them. These were awesome affairs—wine, cheese, meat, chocolate. They took no pity on me. They bombarded me with French, and from snatches of body language, from a smile or a frown, I deduced what I could. I went through entire dinners—and even engaged in conversations—during which I understood only snatches. We spent those evenings talking, our gestures making up for a paucity of shared words. But I knew, in some unnameable way, that they were good people. And from that, I could tell how two people with no shared language could fall easily and deeply in love; how the way a man expresses longing, or a woman expresses possibility, could be like discovery; how an entire person could be, to another, a long, dark country.

The Internet is overrun with advertisements meant for those who feel the longing for another language, who hope to attain understanding without the fear, the pain of mocking or rejection. There is a symmetry in language ads that promise fluency in three weeks and weight-loss ads that promise a new body in roughly the same mere days. But the older I get, the more I treasure the sprawling periods of incomprehension, the not knowing, the lands beyond Google, the places in which you must be immersed to comprehend.

Part of an excerpt from Temple Grandin’s new book:

If people can consciously recognize the strengths and weaknesses in their ways of thinking, they can then seek out the right kinds of minds for the right reasons. And if they do that, then they’re going to recognize that sometimes the right mind can belong only to an autistic brain.

Dreher shares his thoughts:

I remember a few years back, when our son Matthew was suffering a great deal from his Asperger’s and related conditions (sensory processing disorder) — which meant that his parents, especially his mother, struggling with him were suffering too — I thought that there was no amount of giftedness that was worth what that child was going through. He’s a really intelligent kid, but I would have traded that genius in a heartbeat for respite for him from what really was torment. He has grown out of most of the bad stuff, thank God, and I can see easily now how his mild autism can be a tremendous intellectual and vocational asset to him, depending on the field he goes into, even as it remains to some degree a social problem. Put simply, he sees things that most of us don’t, and he sees them as a result of the way his brain is wired.

This is a gift. It is at times a terrible gift, but it is a gift.

Alyssa heralds their rise. On the movie whose trailer is seen above:

The tension in Don Jon comes not from the idea that Jon might be unable to overcome his addiction to porn and as a result, lose out on Barbara, but that these two horribly mismatched people might end up together because it’s what they expect they’re supposed to do. … [W]hile most romantic comedies focus on the work that couples do in the relationship they’ll end up in, putting their bad dates, agonizing breakups, and most hurtful failures in the past, unromantic comedies take a step back in time to focus on the fallacies, self-delusions, and errors that precede successful, long-term relationships.

I’d say those errors do not end with a successful relationship. They just need to be managed and recognized. One thing I have learned from married life is a realism about who I am and the daily effort required to make that work with another person. I think of my marriage as born in romance of the most extreme kind but sustained by unromantic commitment and love that is sometimes effortless but also sometimes an act of will. I’m a better person for it, flawed though I remain.

Ned Resnikoff highlights the tense battle over public school closings in Chicago:

Wednesday afternoon, the Chicago Board of Education voted to close 50 reportedly “underutilized” schools—49 elementary schools and one public high school—in what was the largest round of school closures to ever occur in a single American city.

Diane Ravitch recognizes the significance:

The New York Times has written about this story and twice said that the school closings were the largest “in recent memory.” The Times wrote this despite my telling them–twice–that these were the largest mass closure ever. I wish the reporters would explain whose “memory” they were relying on. Just yesterday I explained in an email that no public school district had ever closed 49 schools at one time. On this issue, the “Times” is not the newspaper of record but the newspaper of “recent memory.”

Why does it matter?

The phraseology removes the truly historic destruction that Rahm Emanuel is inflicting on children and schools in his city. He is wantonly destroying public education. He is punishing the teachers’ union for daring to strike last fall. He will open more charter schools, staffed by non-union teachers, to pick up the kids who lost their neighborhood schools. Some of them will be named for the equity investors who fund his campaigns.

Walter Russell Mead thinks the anger at the school board is misdirected:

 Years of broken and corrupt politics have left the city with a $1 billion budget deficit, a soaring crime rate, and constant tension between the government and unions. The pain has fallen worst on the poor and minority communities, and they are responding by getting out. Over the past decade, Chicago’s black population declined by 17 percent, as blacks fled the for the suburbs or the more promising economies of the South. The windy city is now at its lowest population since before 1920. No wonder the schools are closing.

Madrigal examines Microsoft’s claim that the servers for their recently announced Xbox One gaming system will exceed “the entire world’s computing power in 1999.” He gets Martin Hilbert, who co-authored a paper on world processing capacity over time, to weigh in:

“I think the reality is rather that the computing power of this cluster is equal to the world’s total computing power in 1994 or the world’s general-purpose computing power in 1996.” As he summed it up, “I’d say they are some 5 years off… but nevertheless very impressive!”

Amanda Marcotte reacts to the recent finding that “women are far more likely to lose interest in sex with their partners” than men:

What’s really fascinating is that with this shift in understanding comes a profound shift in how we as a society are deciding to respond. There will be no shrugging of the shoulders and tossing around the word “hard-wired” to rationalize women disappointing male expectations of passionate monogamous sex. Instead, as Bergner writes, a ton of money is being spent on developing a drug women can take to restore their desire for their husbands. The drug, called Lybrido, is in clinical trials now with the hope of writing an FDA application by the end of the year. …

When people believed that boredom with monogamy was a male trait for women to endure, interest in fixing it was pretty low. Now that we understand boredom with monogamy to be a female trait for men to endure, it’s suddenly a Problem—with possible solutions. Though frustrating, this is ultimately probably a good thing. Since most of us want to be monogamous, it’s about time we took seriously the need to keep it interesting.