Pan's concert

"She was frankly disappointed when [Pan] proved to be slighter in stature than her Alobar, and she could barely keep from sniggering at his foul tangles of wool and his silly tail. Even his stench failed to measure up to Alobar's description of it, striking her as more locally naughty than universally nasty. It wasn't until he began to pipe that Kudra got some sense of Who (or What) He Really Was.

At first, his playing, too, seemed slight; it was so simple, careless, and primitive that one had to sympathize with Timolus, who, judging the music contest between Pan and Apollo, had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the Apollonian lyre, thereby establishing the tradition that critics must laud polish and restraint, attack what is quirky and disobedient, a tradition that endures to this day. Had Timolus not hooked Pan off the stage so quickly, had he possessed the - what? the honesty? the humility? (Timolus, after all, couldn't play shit) the nerve? to actually listen to Pan, to respond with something more genuine than his preconceptions, he might have been affected, as Kudra began to be affected, once she stopped smirking at his obvious lack of formal training and quit comparing him unfavorably with the flutist, Lord Krishna. Pan's song, because it served no purpose, was above all, liberating. It was music beyond the control of the player's will or the listener's will; the will, in fact, dissolved in it (which may explain why it was politically necessary for Apollo, with the compliance of Timolus, to drown it out)... Kudra felt that at Pan's concert she was on less than solid ground, yet, as unsteady as that ground might be, she was driven to dance upon it."

- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Free floating in the sewers of architecture

I graduated from SCI_Arc on Sunday, flushed from the institute out into the real world. Wish me luck!

The jury for my final review was nothing short of amazing:

Tom Mayne
Sylvia Lavin
Neil Denari
Emmanuel Petit
Craig Hodgetts
Hernan Diaz Alonso
Benjamin Bratton

The review was, in a word, contentious. Sylvia Lavin and I just don't seem to have common ground.

Zizek on Toilets

my two favorite songs right now

(alternate versions...)

Big Ideas, Don't Get Any, James Houston


Bjork at Coachella, All Is Full Of Love

Live is Life!

as the final credits roll...

Laibach

and another one, more scary...

from our good friend rob

"I've been watching the Olympics sporadically. Who even knew there was such a thing as synchronized diving? I'd already read articles and watched a couple of documentaries on the Bird's Nest and Water Cube--though as much as I enjoy the design, I can't help noting that from the air the Water Cube resembles nothing so much as a quilted mattress. I caught the beginning and end of the opening ceremony. The 2008 drummers were a not altogether flattering look into the soul of the Chinese regime, which I guess we're supposed to call authoritarian rather than totalitarian these days, and the spookiness of the spectacle was only heightened by the rictuses the drummers were instructed to display after they seemed too intimidating in the dress rehearsal. But the moment that most got to me was the Red Army soldiers raising the PRC flag. They'd been made up with some goo that made them positively glisten. It was the perfect counterpart to the '36 Olympics' Aryan ubermenschen.

Did you notice how during the start of their opening ceremony coverage, NBC peppered the script with phrases like "great leap" and "long march" that have enormous resonance in recent Chinese history, but used the phrases utterly out of their historical context, an inappositeness that was especially jarring considering the human suffering caused by the Great Leap Forward? So now we know (1) the Olympics are not just a small step for China, they're a great leap, (2) it's been a long march for China to these Olympics, and (3) NBC's writers are brainless hacks. Only the last of these is an insight that's likely to stay with us."

Solaris Highway Scene