Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Can You Explain to Me Why when We Defecate We
‘Can you explain to me why, when we defecate, we often examine our excrement?’ Aesop explained: ‘In olden days there was a king’s son who, because of his life of luxury, spent most of his time sitting and shitting. Once he remained seated thus so long that, having forgotten what he was doing, he shat his own common sense. From that day forward, men shit hunched over, being careful not to crap away their own common sense. But don’t you worry: you can’t shit something you don’t possess!’ Anonymous, The Aesop Romance, quoted in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p134.
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And to Thee Nothing Is Whatsoever Evil Yea Not
And to Thee nothing is whatsoever evil: yea, not only to Thee, but also to Thy creation as a whole, because there is nothing without, which may break in, and corrupt that order which Thou hast appointed it. But in the parts thereof some things, because unharmonising with other some, are accounted evil: whereas those ver things harmonise with others, and are good; and in themselves are good. And all these things which harmonise not together, do yet with the inferior part, which we call Earth, having its own cloudy and windy sky harmonising with it. Far be it then that I should say, ‘These things should not be’: for indeed long for the better; but still must even for these alone praise Thee; for that Thou are to be praised , do show from the earth, dragons, and all deeps, fire, hail, snow, ice, and stormy wind, which fulfil Thy word […] St. Augustine, The Confessions, VII, quoted in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p48.
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The Poets Have Utilized What Are Called Solecisms
The poets have utilized what are called solecisms and barbarisms; they have preferred, by changing the names, to call them figures and transformations, rather than avoid them as evident errors. Well, take them out of poetry, and we would miss the most melodious sweetness. Gather many together in a single composition, and it will vex me because all will be mawkish, pedantic, affected […] The order that governs and moderates such things would not tolerate their being too many, nor too few. A humble and almost disregarded discourse highlights elevated expressions and elegant movements, alternating between one and the other. St. Augustine, On Order, IV. Quoted in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p47.
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We Can Never Exactly Present to Ourselves or to
We can never exactly present to ourselves, or to others. Thus we are not exactly real for one another, nor are we quite real even to ourselves. And this radical alterity is our best chance… Put simply, our chance at life. Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p71.
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Darren Almond’s Geisterbahn
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Rodney Graham’s Rheinmetall
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After the Age of Architecture Sculpture We Are Now
After the age of architecture-sculpture we are now in the time of cinematographic factitiousness; literally, as well as figuratively, from now on architecture is only a movie … the city is no longer a theater (agora, forum) but the cinema of city lights… Paul Virilio, Aesthetics of Disappearance, quoted in Neumann, “Lumnious Buildings”, p27.
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The City of the Future Is a Vast Lunatic Growth
[The city of the future is] a vast lunatic growth, producing a deepening torrent of savagery below, and above ever more flimsy gentility and silly wastefulness. H.G. Wells, quoted in Wiliams, The Country and the City, p. 273
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And Here from Afar We See an Army of the Dead
And here from afar we see an army
Of the dead strewn o’er the plain,
No prose nor verse can comprehend
Their number, from India, from China,
From Morocco and from Spain
From all the corers of he earth they came,
Men said to be happy,
Popes, kings and emperors;
Now they lie naked, wretched, beggars.
Where are their riches now? Where their honors
Their gems, sceptres, crowns,
Their mitres and their purple?
Wretched is he who hopes in worldly things
(But who does not do so?), and if, in the end,
They are deceived, then this is just.
O ye blind, wherefore all your toil? Petrarch, The Triumph of Death, I. Quotes in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, 2007, p 64. -
I Was Looking at Robert Franks Photograph Sick of
I was looking at Robert Frank’s photograph Sick of Goodby’s in his book The Lines of My Hand. Moments before I had been listening to a Johnny Cash song called I Wish I Was Crazy Again. Then I thought of the goodbyes in the book to old friends caught once and for all and never again to be seen in life, and I was struck by the intensity of the sadness of life and its redeeming qualities as reflected in these moving photos. With Johnny Cash as well, the desire to see it all again, to go out one more time into the wild flame only to be burned up forever and never be seen again except in these farewell photos, is moving beyond description. The photos speak of an acceptance of things as they are. the inevitable death of us all and the last photo – that last unposed shot to remind us of our friends, of our loss of the times we had in a past captured only on film in black and white. Frank has been there, and seen that, and recorded it with such subtlety that we only look in awe, our own hearts beating with the memories of lost partners and songs.
To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera is the least a great artist can do. Robert Frank is a great democrat. We’re all in these photos. Paint dripping from a mirror like blood. I’m sick of goodbyes. And aren’t we all, but it’s nice to see it said.
Lou Reed on Robert Frank’s Sick of Goodby’s (1978). From the Tate’s “Six Reflections on the Photography of Robert Frank”