Strata’s ideal resident is an altogether wealthier breed of pioneering urbanaut
March 21, 2014 § Leave a comment
More than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote it, we can now say that “Romeo and Juliet” has the wrong name. Perhaps the play should be called “Juliet and Her Nurse,” which isn’t nearly as sexy, or “Romeo and Benvolio,” which has a whole different connotation.
I discovered this by writing a computer program to count how many lines each pair of characters in “Romeo and Juliet” spoke to each other, with the expectation that the lovers in the greatest love story of all time would speak more than any other pair. I wanted Romeo and Juliet to end up together — if they couldn’t in the play, at least they could in my analysis — but the math paid no heed to my desires. Juliet speaks more to her nurse than she does to Romeo; Romeo speaks more to Benvolio than he does to Juliet. Romeo gets a larger share of attention from his friends (Benvolio and Mercutio) and even his enemies (Tybalt) than he does from Juliet; Juliet gets a larger share of attention from her nurse and her mother than she does from Romeo. The two appear together in only five scenes out of 25. We all knew that this wasn’t a play predicated on deep interactions between the two protagonists, but still.
I’m blaming Romeo for this lack of communication. Juliet speaks 155 lines to him, and he speaks only 101 to her. His reticence toward Juliet is particularly inexcusable when you consider that Romeo spends more time talking than anyone else in the play. (He spends only one-sixth of his time in conversation with the supposed love of his life.) One might be tempted to blame this on the nature of the plot; of course the lovers have no chance to converse, kept apart as they are by the loathing of their families! But when I analyzed the script of a modern adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” — “West Side Story” — I found that Tony and Maria interacted more in the script than did any other pair.
All this got me thinking: Do any of Shakespeare’s lovers actually, you know, talk to each other? If Romeo and Juliet don’t, what hope do the rest of them have? read more
PHOTOGRAPH: DHA
1888? Whitechapel Murders, Nintendo
March 14, 2014 § Leave a comment
The Bank of England’s Quarterly Review contains a detailed description of how money creation works in the UK’s fiat money economy…
And it is controversial. It rejects conventional theories of bank lending and money creation (my emphasis):
“The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks:
• Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.
• In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits.”
To be sure, numerous papers from many eminent researchers and august institutions (including the Fed, the IMF, the ECB and the Bank for International Settlements) have cast doubt upon conventional theory as an adequate explanation of money creation in a modern fiat money system. But to my knowledge this is the first time that a central bank has presented an explanation of money creation that so comprehensively departs from conventional orthodoxy…
It is of course difficult for mainstream economists to accept that the theory they have believed and taught for so many years – and upon which many models of the economy depend – is simply inadequate. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Katie West
Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves
March 6, 2014 § Leave a comment
Leningrad: The 900 Days (Sergio Leone)
Inspired by the “invasion theme” of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony and influenced by Times journalist Harrison Salisbury’s book The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, it was the story of doomed love between a cynical American newsreel cameraman and a young Soviet girl against the epic background of the siege. Leone: “Think of Gone with the Wind.” The director imagined Robert De Niro in the lead, with music by Ennio Morricone, and shooting in the USSR. It was delayed indefinitely by Leone’s inability to commit his many ideas to paper and Soviet producers’ reluctance to grant permission.
Libra (Phil Joanou)
Based on Don DeLillo’s speculative novel about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and the events leading to JFK’s assassination. Gary Oldman was to star.
The Lifted Spear (Akira Kurosawa)
Like Kagemusha, Spear would have climaxed with a grand battle involving the 16th-century warlord Nobunaga Oda. Due to wartime shortages no horses were available for the crucial scene, and the project was subsequently abandoned.
The Lily of the Valley (Max Ophüls)
Adaptation of the 1835 Balzac novel about an intense but chaste love between a man and a woman.
The Living Room (Michael Powell)
Adaptation of Graham Greene’s play set in Fifties London about a mysterious house, its occupants, and a love affair that turns tragic. Rex Harrison was to star.
The Lodger (Lino Brocka)
Written by Nick Joaquin.
The Loves of d’Annunzio and Duse (Orson Welles)
Welles wrote this screenplay for Greta Garbo (to play Eleonora Duse) and Charlie Chaplin (Gabriele d’Annunzio) and described the project as a story about two crazy monsters in a state of degenerate hyper-romanticism, with a ridiculous and theatrical passion. Neither Chaplin nor Garbo wanted to do it. read more
ART: Horyon Lee
US Advises Allies Not to Border Russia
March 4, 2014 § Leave a comment
The first map on the left shows the most common European surnames by country. read more
ART: Kitagawa Utamaro
But one day, chugging along, I noticed an old lady slowly walk toward me. I had plenty of time to stop and swerve around her; instead I ran into her and she fell
February 27, 2014 § Leave a comment
Luke and I were looking at Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights and discovered, much to our amusement, music written upon the posterior of one of the many tortured denizens of the rightmost panel of the painting which is intended to represent Hell. I decided to transcribe it into modern notation, assuming the second line of the staff is C, as is common for chants of this era.
so yes this is LITERALLY the 600-years-old butt song from hell listen
PHOTOGRAPH: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
In what is amounting to a waking nightmare, today I found a 52 page Word document called “Notes to Think About.”
February 25, 2014 § Leave a comment
Crystal Palace fans reacted to Wayne Rooney’s new £300,000 per week contract with chants of “you fat greedy bastard.”
Sadly, Mr Rooney did not respond in the manner of one of his celebrated predecessors. But he should have, because the chant is wrong. Mr Rooney is not getting £300,000 a week because he is unusually greedy: in the improbable event of being offered such money, who among us would turn it down? He is getting it because he is unusually powerful – a power which is not entirely due merely to his exceptional skill.
Palace fans, then, are committing the fundamental attribution error – they are blaming Rooney’s salary upon his personal character rather than upon his situation.
Although Palace fans are – with the odd exception – not famous for their powers of thought, this error is a common one: “greedy bankers” is a cliche, “overly powerful bankers”, whilst true, is not. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Anita Sto
M&A that drives an industry toward oligopoly is the good kind
February 20, 2014 § 1 Comment
Just as playing a lot of chess can prompt one to start seeing the world in terms of reciprocal moves, or long sessions of Photoshop can make one see reality as so many adjustable layers, cumulative Facebook use habituates users to view social reality as a “browseable archive” organized in terms of discrete yet infinitely connectable individual profiles. The “ontological assumptions about the informational character of the world” built into Facebook — the assumption that experience can be readily translated into sortable data with no meaningful loss of integrity — gradually become, Mitchell argues, the ontological assumptions of its users, producing what he calls “archival subjectivity.”
Part of this subjectivity is a preference for “convenience and automaticity” rather than “use or control”: that is, for Facebook users, what can easily be added to the archive seems more real than that which resists it. Having an automatically archived self promises ontological security, Mitchell suggests, to compensate for the “disposability of the digital world” and the erosion of traditional supports for stable identity. Also, since your identity is being built in Facebook as data without your active participation, it can be processed in various ways (laid out in a Timeline, say, or in a short clip about your year’s Facebook activity), allowing you to consume your own identity as a fascinating, perfectly targeted cultural good…
But it’s just as likely that users invert the “browsing” subjectivity rather than inhabit it unreflexively. The idea that we want sociality to be convenient and efficient is built into Facebook as a platform, but that doesn’t mean we necessarily have to inhabit that value system in using it. The idea that convenience is so irresistible that people’s yearnings are immediately and automatically reshaped in its image is itself part of capitalism’s ideology of individualism and “rational” maximization. Consumerism is anchored in the idea that people can be atomized and controlled by their desire for hyperpersonalized pleasures that other people only interfere with. But often pleasure is a matter of inconvenience, particularly when it involves social interaction. The inconvenience of other people, the circuitous routes we must take to communicate and establish shared bases for experience — these are inefficient but also so pleasurable that we often claim this pursuit of intimacy is the only “real” pleasure. Habituation to Facebook’s ontological assumptions, which reject such a view of intimacy, may have the effect of foregrounding the tension between the platforms value system and our own, rather than allowing Facebook to function hegemonically as a kind of “pre-understanding.” We can end up embracing simultaneously the browseable reality Facebook provides and the unbrowseable reality that it frames and valorizes despite itself. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Bart Ramakers
“My favorite sort of parade,” observed Washington Heights resident Galvane Hendsberg, struggling for adequate words. “Not too much fuss and bother, easy to miss. I myself didn’t notice a thing.”
February 18, 2014 § Leave a comment
On its face, flipping on white noise before hitting the sack must be the most counterintuitive idea out there. Want to sleep better? Simple solution: make a bunch of noise. Sweet dreams ahoy.
And yet, not only do some people swear they can’t get to sleep without a fan running, there are even companies that will sell you optimized noise-makers for helping you get the best of your bed rest. What is up with our brains and our ears?
The short answer: white noise is better noise. At least for (some) sleepers.
White noise, if you’re using the technical definition, is a consistent noise that comes out evenly across all hearable frequencies. Say you’re a musician. To play a middle C note, you play something that’s about 261.6 hertz, the unit of frequency. White noise is just an equal amount at every frequency, from low to high, that a human being can hear. To keep the music analogy going, it’s a gigantic band all playing a slightly different note. (Machines pushed to the limit, like fans, are especially good at hitting these notes.)
When a noise wakes you up in the night, it’s not the noise itself that wakes you up, per se, but the sudden change or inconsistencies in noise that jar you. White noise creates a masking effect, blocking out those sudden changes that frustrate light sleepers, or people trying to fall asleep. “The simple version is that hearing still works while you’re asleep,” says Seth S. Horowitz, a neuroscientist and author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind.
“This is why the majority of bedpartners prefer the constant white noise of a CPAP machine rather than their spouse’s crescendo-decrescendo snoring sounds,” Clete A. Kushida, director of the Stanford Center for Human Sleep Research, writes in an email to Popular Science.
Makes sense, right? read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Hagiwara Yoshihiro
Let’s count the rings around my eyes
February 14, 2014 § Leave a comment
The Financial Times has a very interesting profile of former Bakersfield real estate guy Carl Cole, who’s about to start a long stint in prison for mortgage fraud during the bubble.
That time is well deserved, as the FT shows, but it’s yet another reminder of how the relatively small fry have gotten pinched after the crash, while everyone on Wall Street remains free.
At first, it looks like the paper will get into this critical angle, getting in a great line in the third paragraph about how “banks that cheat people pay fines, but people who cheat banks do time.”
But the FT never really gets there, ultimately letting Wall Street off the hook as if it were a victim of the mortgage-fraud frenzy.
Here’s the critical passage (emphasis mine):
It felt great because Crisp & Cole had become connected to a higher power – Wall Street. The firm sat at the local end of a global supply chain. Its scores of employees were creating hundreds of mortgages a year for banks, which were then packaging the home loans into securities sold to investors around the world – the ultimate source of most of the money used to fund US house purchases, then and now.
The conceit of the bankers involved in this trade was that the mortgages they were buying were a kind of commodity – like the crude coming out of a Bakersfield oil well. But the grist for the mortgage-backed securities mill was paper – and lots of it: income verification statements, appraisals and other documents prepared by human beings at firms such as Crisp & Cole.
This put local real estate people in a position to pull the wool over the eyes of Wall Street. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Stanley Kubrick
wch Restraynt is by the meanes of playinge the Jeylle of dooges
February 13, 2014 § Leave a comment
Luder
The three finest works of British brutalism were designed by Rodney Gordon of the Owen Luder Partnership. They were: Eros House in Catford, London; the Tricorn in Portsmouth; and the Trinity in Gateshead. The first, a block of flats, is disfigured; the other two shopping centre and car park complexes have been destroyed in acts of petty-minded provincial vandalism. One can have nothing but contempt for the scum-of-the-earth councillors, blind planners and toady local journalists who conspired to effect the demolition of such masterpieces. One can only despair at the pusillanimous lack of support from wretched English Heritage.
The dependably crass Prince of Wales, the man who sullied Dorset with Poundbury, described the Tricorn as “a mildewed lump of elephant droppings”, a simile as vulgar as it is visually inept. No doubt his heritage industry toadies removed their tongues in order to chortle a moment’s laughter. The critic Ian Nairn was on the money: “This great belly laugh of forms … the only thing that has been squandered is imagination.”
Gordon’s imagination was indeed fecund, rich, untrammelled. It was haunted by Russian constructivism, crusader castles, Levantine skylines. But the paramount desire was to make an architecture that had not previously existed. There are as many ideas in a single Gordon building as there are in the entire careers of most architects. The seldom-photographed street level stuff at the Trinity left the observer with the sensation of being in the presence of genius. One thinks of the burning of books.
Monstrosity
It took more than three-quarters of a century before high Victorian architecture began to be rehabilitated through the efforts of John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, etc. Their pleas went unheeded. They were reckoned to be perverse and mischievous. Thousands of “monstrosities” were destroyed. The survivors are now widely valued, and lost ones are mourned. We have learned nothing. Half a century after brutalism’s heyday, the term “concrete monstrosity” trips readily off the tongues of the unseeing, the torpid, the incurious. Britain is once again being architecturally cleansed in favour of timidity and insipidity.
New
Newness and change were bound to be for the better. When Harold Macmillan announced in 1957 that “most of our people have never had it so good”, some of our people were still living in caves (in the Severn valley), and many of our people had no bathrooms and shared outdoor toilets. Built along brutalist lines, new flats had all those amenities, plus central heating, and were welcomed by their occupants. Social-housing projects were not yet bins for sociopaths. But they would soon become so: if blocks are unguarded, if there are no janitors, if they are not maintained … You don’t buy a car and never get it serviced. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Franck Bohbot
my nerves are bad to-night 