The next candidate I would like to consider as part of my Modern Cathedrals series (Part 1 here) is the stadium.
Stadiums are amongst the largest, most open and community-centred buildings of our time. A stadium is one of the few buildings where tens of thousands of people can come together for a single purpose, or to [...]
Here’s a wallpaper I made from a photo taken at an abandoned theme park at the top of a hill in San Sebastian (click for full size).
I love abandoned places like this. The park was opened in 1909 or thereabouts, and there are plaques commemorating the monarch coming to visit, but now it’s almost totally [...]
From Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a (brilliant and witty) story about a man who turns into a woman, this bit is set around 1750:
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us. For example, when [...]
A fantastic example of simulacra.
Perhaps the most powerful and obvious example of simulacra in our lives is that of “make-up”, in the widest possible sense of the word. To change your body and appearance to look like someone else who in turn is a copy, and a distorted copy at that, of someone else. It’s difficult [...]
Travelling was quite different to what I had expected.
It was fantastic seeing some new and different cultures, looking at how different groups and nations organised things in different ways and comparing them to what I am used to. One particularly interesting comparison was how different countries treated the environment. For example in Germany they have [...]
As mentioned a few posts ago, I've had exams over the past few weeks, hence the short updates; I've been working more or less all day every day for a month and it's had a significant effect on me, changing my outlook and depositing a load of new ideas.
One of the first things that hit me was [...]
Adam Curtis' new documentary aired recently on BBC2; it was fantastic, as expected, he has a stunning track record, his previous films have been some of the best programmes ever broadcast. It's called The Trap: What Happened to our Dream of Freedom, you can find it through bittorrent, or on google video. In his previous videos he [...]