Beautiful cities, good experiences

At eye level the good city provides opportunities for walking, staying, meeting and expression, and that means it must provide good scaleand good climate. Common to these desired objectives and quality requirements is that they deal largely with physical and practical matters.

In contrast, work with the city's visual quality is more general. It deals largely with the design and detail of individual elements, and how all the elements are coordinated. Visual quality involves total visual expression, aesthetics, design and architecture.

City space can be designed so that all practical requirements are met, but randomly combined details, materials and colors rob it of visual coordination.

In contrast, city space can be designed with dominating emphasis on aesthetics to the neglect of functional aspects. That the space is beautiful and the details carefully designed is a quality in itself, but far from enoughif basic requirements for security, climate, and opportunities for staying are notmet.

The important aspects of city space must be interwoven into a convincing whole.

In his book, City: Rediscovering the Center (1988), William H. Whyte introduces the concept of the100% place. As the nameimplies, 100% places arethe spaces and localities where allimportant city space qualities are present. Practical concerns for users’ needs merge seamlessly with concern for detail and totality: here is where people want to be.

Perhaps the world-farmous Piazza del Campo in Siena became famous precisely because this city square offers that rare combination of qualities. All functional and practical needs are convincingly met. It is safe and comfortabletowalk, stand, sit, listen and talk here. In addition, all elements have been merged into a convindng architectural whole, where proportions, materials, colors and details reinforce and enrich the other qualities of the space. Piazza del Campo is a well-functioning and very beautiful city space that for 700 years has served and continues convincingly to serve as Siena’s main square. Concern for the human dimension is never outdated.

In addition to independent work with space and details, it is often possible to make significant quality improvements if a city space is designed to highlight special qualities at the site. New and attractive combinations are possible when city space can be linked directly to water surfaces and quay edges, when contact with parks, flowers and landscaping can be ensured, when spaces can be oriented perfectly in terms of local climate.

Topography and height differences also provide good opportuni- ties to add value. Any differences in height can enhance experiences for pedestrians compared to walking on flat surfaces. New views and experiences pop up. The streets of San Frandsco are full of this type of possibility, however minor differences in height can also provide drama at eye level.

Views of attractions near and far also enrich city space. Being able to look at a lake, the sea, a landscape or distant mountains is much in demand as a city space quality.

There is inherent potential in working with visual and aesthetic elements. For people walking through the city, beautiful space, carefully planned details and genuine materials provide valuable experiences on their own merits and as a valuable extra layer to the other qualities the city has to offer.

Naturally, squares and streets can also be designed specifically to provide visual experiences. Here the design and details of the space play a very important role, which can be expanded and reinforced by appealing to the other senses by providing trickling water, fog, steam, aromatic and sound impressions, for example. The main attraction ofthese spaces is not just dty life as such, butrather a potpourri of sensory impressions.

Throughout history, art has made a valuable quality contribution to city space through monuments, sailptures, fountains, building details and decorations. Art communicates beauty, monumentality, remembrance of important events, comments on life in society, fellow inhabitants and city life, together with surprises and humor. Now as ever, city space can serve an important function as an interface between art and people.

In recent years in central parts of Melbourne, efforts to combine art policy and dty space policy have served as an inspiring example. The goal has been for the city's common space to serve as a versatile gallery for conternporary art, so that when the people of Melbourne are in the city, they will meet carefully selected and well-placed works of conternporary artists fram many disciplines. A three-pronged art policy ensures that selections are arrent and provid ea wealth of experience. The three focus areas are works on permanent display, temporary works and installations, and extensive communication about art to the inhabitants of the dty through art centers. One particular emphasis is interactive opportunities for children based onthe principle: come and learn more aboutwhat you seein the daty.

The city policy of emphasis on installations and temporary works makes avaluable contribution to the attractive selection of experiences and unpredictability. Along the Gty’s many narrow lanes and arcades, changing artists decorate spaces with intensity, fantasy and humor, but only for a limited number of months. Then other artists are invited to work on other passageways. There is always something new to look at, and many surprising and humorous comments to discover about the site, the city and contemporary life.

Trees, landscaping and flowers play a key role among the elements in city space. Trees provide shade in warm summer months, they cool and cleanse the air, define city space and help accentuate important sites. A large tree on a square signals: “This is the place”. Trees along boulevards underscore a linear sequence, and trees that stretch their branches over the street hint of the presence of green space inthe dty.

In addition to their immediate aesthetic qualities, the green elements inthe dry havea symbolicvalue. The presence of green elements passes onarmessage about recreation, introspection, beauty, sustainability and the diversity of nature.

After many years in which trees were felled to make room for traffic or simply died due to poor growth conditions and pollution, there has been a welcome renaissance of green elements in cities more recently. Efforts to improve the conditions for city life and bicydists are often ambined with planting new trees and expanding green urban areas. Every year since 1995, 500 new trees have been planted along streets in Melbourne as part of the city's urban renewal policy, and in accordance with a plan adopted in 2008, New York Citys goal is to plant ane million new trees in public spaces agoss the city.The many new green elements make a crucial contribution to city quality while reinforcing New York's wanted profile as a sustainable green metropolis.

The lighting in city space has a great impact on orientation, searity and visual quality inthe dark hours.

Many different lighting strategies are used around the world, One extremeis dties in the USA that have abandoned street lighting under the pretext that motor vehides light up the night. Needless to say, these areas are usually as dark as a tomb and there is not much for people to look forward to afterthe sun goes down.

A variety of principles are employed in areas that do use lighting. Many dties are pragmatic and functional in their approach. Lighting principles have often changed during various periods of urban construction and expansion, leaving many types of lamps and various colors of light, which typically results in a random and visually chaotic daty scene when night falls.

Other cities have taken a very conscious approach to lighting, recognizing the great impact it has on city quality, aswell as its potential as an independent artistic means of expression.

In Melbourne city lighting is a natural part of the city’s overall art policy program "Light as Art.”

Lyon, France is another good example of a city that has adopted a well-considered artistic lighting policy that takes into account both light setting and color.

Valuable innovations in work with the visual appearance of space at night can also be seen at the city space level. One good example is the Town Hall Square in Sankt Plten, Austria (1995 — 97), which employs indirect reflected light and a light setting that varies according to time of year and the events being held on the square.

The criteria for good city quality in pedestrian landscapes are surmmarized in a 12-point keyword list on page 239. Point 12 is positive sensory experiences. The reason for listing this point last is that visual quality is an umbrella concept that should include all of the elements in the city landscape. The placement also represents a conscious underscoring of the factthatvisual quality cannot ensure city quality on its own, but that good cities at eye level are geated by working on all 12 quality giteria together.

If cities are to function and invite people to enjoy them, under all cir cumstances, the physical, practical and psychological aspects must be thoroughly treated and then enhanced with valuable layers through work on visual qualities. This connection is emphasized because although many projects do a fine job of developing the visual aspects, they neglect other more pragmatic qualities.

All over the world are examples of city districts and city space where visual and aesthetic considerations have unilaterally dominated design. Perhaps these urban projects and urban spaces will be pictured in ar chitecture magazines, but in the real world these city spaces typically work poorly or not at all, because key consideration for people and life in public space is missing.

All quality criteria must be part of deliberations — everytime.

Jan Gehl

Cities for people

Cities must urge urban planners and architects to reinforce pedestrianism as an integrated city policy to develop lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities. Itis equally urgent to strengthen the social function of city space as a meeting place that contributes toward the aims of social sustainability and an open and democratic society.

Jan Gehl

A country of illiterates

The saint was a topic for two weeks. Two weeks. Quality of life and wealth distribution are not on the agenda. Quality public transport, bike lane? Never.

The goal is to fire up the fanbases, not to enlighten people and build a serious nation.

Mein Kampf

Which Southern state will officially be Nazi-Fascist?

Multitude

How can we discover in the constituent power of the multitude the project of "another world is possible" - a world beyond sovereigny, beyond authority, beyond very tyranny - that is endowed with an instituional method of guarantes and constitutional motors?

When we take off the blinders of capitalist society that limit our vision, we can see with Marx that material wealth, including commodities property, and money, is not an end in itself.

Karl Marx insists that one of the great progressive elements of capital historically is to organize armies of workers.

Plutocracy

The real Brazil is a land of poverty, corporate greed, xenophobia, illiteracy and violence.

Criminal industry

Poor Latin America — it is in the hands of criminals, traffickers, thieves, corrupt, addicts, sick, alienated and, off course, Nazifascists.

Freshwater drain

In the last hundred years, many of the planet’s largest lakes have begun drying up, from the Aral Sea in central Asia, which was once the world’s fourth largest and which has lost more than 90 percent of its volume in recent decades, to Lake Mead, which supplies much of Las Vegas’s water and has lost as much as 400 billion gallons in a single year. Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second biggest, has completely disappeared; Iran’s Lake Urmia has shrunk more than 80 percent in thirty years. Lake Chad has more or less evaporated entirely. Climate change is only one factor in this story, but its impact is not going to shrink over time.

Freshwater drain

The World Bank found, freshwater availability in cities around the world could decline by as much as two-thirds. Overall, according to the United Nations, five billion people could have poor access to freshwater by 2050.

In India, already, 600 million face “high to extreme water stress”, according to a 2018 government report, and 200,000 people die each year from lacking or contaminated water. By 2030, according to the same report, India will have only half the water it needs.

Freshwater drain

In many African countries already, you are expected to get by on as little as twenty liters of water each day — less than half of what water organizations say is necessary for public health.

Today, the crisis is political — which is to say, not inevitable or necessary or beyond our capacity to fix — and, therefore, functionally elective. That is one reason it is nevertheless harrowing as a climate parable: an abundant resource made scarce through governmental neglect and indifference, bad infrastructure and contamination, careless urbanization and development. There is no need for a water crisis, in other words, but we have one anyway, and aren’t doing much to address it. Some cities lose more water to leaks than they deliver to homes: even in the United States, leaks and theft account for an estimated loss of 16 percent of freshwater; in Brazil, the estimate is 40 percent. In both cases, as everywhere, scarcity plays out so nakedly on a stage defined by haveand-have-not inequities that the resulting drama of resource competition can hardly be called, truly, a competition; the deck is so stacked that water shortage looks more like a tool of inequality. The global result is that as many as 2.1 billion people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water, and 4.5 billion don’t have safely managed water for sanitation.

Climate change

Albatross, masked boobies, black noddies 

and other seabirds called East Island home.

Extreme weather it is what roars back at us from the ever-worsening fringe of climate events. This is among the scariest features of rapid climate change: not that it changes the everyday experience of the world, though it does that, and dramatically; but that it makes once-unthinkable outlier events much more common, and ushers whole new categories of disaster into the realm of the possible. The result is a radically accelerated experience of extreme weather — what was once centuries’ worth of natural disaster compressed into just a decade or two. In the case of Hawaii’s East Island, which disappeared underwater during a single hurricane, into a day or two.

Climate change

For the world’s poor, recovery from environmental collapse is almost impossible. Rebuilding is an entirely different matter for countries as rich.

Climate change

Oil business together with the governments has worked tirelessly to undermine public understanding of climate change and derail global attempts at reducing carbon emissions.

Disasters no longer natural

Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, and live not far from the mainland on an island millions of Americans have visited personally. And yet when climate disaster struck there, we processed their suffering, perhaps out of psychological self-interest, as foreign and far away. Trump barely mentioned Puerto Rico in the week after Maria, and while that may not surprise, neither did the Sunday talk shows. By the weekend, a few days after the hurricane traversed the island, it was off the front page of The New York Times as well. When Trump’s feud with the heroic mayor of San Juan and his problematic visit to the island — during which he tossed paper towels into a crowd without power or water like T-shirts at a Knicks game — made the hurricane a partisan issue, Americans did begin to focus on the destruction a bit more. But the attention paid remains trivial compared to the humanitarian toll — and when compared to the response to natural disasters that have recently hit the American mainland. “We’re getting some intimations of how the ruling class intends to handle the accumulating disasters of the Anthropocene,” as the cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, of the New School, wrote. “We’re on our own”.

Harrison Bergeron

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.

"Huh" said George.

"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.

"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.

"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up."

"Um," said George.

"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."

"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.

"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."

"Good as anybody else," said George.

"Who knows better than I do what normal is?" said Hazel.

"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.

"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"

It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.

"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."

George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me."

"You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."

"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain."

"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just sit around."

"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

"I'd hate it," said Hazel.

"There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"

If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.

"What would?" said George blankly.

"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?

"Who knows?" said George.

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen."

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."

"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.

And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him."

There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.

Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.

George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have - for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"

The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.

When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.

Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.

"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"

Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"

A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.

She was blindingly beautiful.

"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.

The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."

The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

The music began again and was much improved.

Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

They shifted their weights to their toes.

Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.

It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.

And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.

"Yup," she said.

"What about?" he said.

"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."

"What was it?" he said.

"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.

"Forget sad things," said George.

"I always do," said Hazel.

"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.

"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.

"You can say that again," said George.

"Gee", said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."

Kurt Vonnegut

1922 - 2007

A country of illiterates

It is becoming increasingly clear: the secular state is an absolutely illusory concept. Brazil is a very primitive country.

The uninhabitable earth

The photograph indifferent plutocracy

By accidents of geography and by the force of its wealth, the United States has, to this point, been mostly protected from the devastation climate change has already visited on parts of the less-developed world — mostly. The fact that warming is now hitting our wealthiest citizens is not just an opportunity for ugly bursts of liberal schadenfreude; it is also a sign of just how hard, and how indiscriminately, it is hitting. All of a sudden, it’s getting a lot harder to protect against what’s coming.

What is coming? Much more fire, much more often, burning much more land. Over the last five decades, the wildfire season in the western United States has already grown by two and a half months; of the ten years with the most wildfire activity on record, nine have occurred since 2000. Globally, since just 1979, the season has grown by nearly 20 percent, and American wildfires now burn twice as much land as they did as recently as 1970. By 2050, destruction from wildfires is expected to double again, and in some places within the United States the area burned could grow fivefold. For every additional degree of global warming, it could quadruple. What this means is that at three degrees of warming, our likely benchmark for the end of the century, the United States might be dealing with sixteen times as much devastation from fire as we are today, when in a single year ten million acres were burned. At four degrees of warming, the fire season would be four times worse still. The California fire captain believes the term is already outdated: “We don’t even call it fire season anymore,” he said in 2017. “Take the ‘season’ out—it’s year-round.”

But wildfires are not an American affliction; they are a global pandemic. In icy Greenland, fires in 2017 appeared to burn ten times more area than in 2014; and in Sweden, in 2018, forests in the Arctic Circle went up in flames. Fires that far north may seem innocuous, relatively speaking, since there are not so many people up there. But they are increasing more rapidly than fires in lower latitudes, and they concern climate scientists greatly: the soot and ash they give off can land on and blacken ice sheets, which then absorb more of the sun’s rays and melt more quickly. Another Arctic fire broke out on the Russia-Finland border in 2018, and smoke from Siberian fires that summer reached all the way to the mainland United States. That same month, the twenty-first century’s second-deadliest wildfire had swept through the Greek seaside, killing ninety-nine. At one resort, dozens of guests tried to escape the flames by descending a narrow stone staircase into the Aegean, only to be engulfed along the way, dying literally in each other’s arms.

The effects of these fires are not linear or neatly additive. It might be more accurate to say that they initiate a new set of biological cycles. Scientists warn that, even as California is baked into brush by a drier future, making inevitable more and more damaging fires, the probability of unprecedented-seeming rainfalls will grow, too — as much as a threefold increase of events like that which produced the state’s Great Flood of 1862. And mudslides are among the clearest illustrations of what new horrors that heralds; in Santa Barbara that January, the town’s lowlying homes were pounded by the mountains’ detritus cascading down the hillside toward the ocean in an endless brown river. One father, in a panic, put his young children up on his kitchen’s marble countertop, thinking it the strongest feature of the house, then watched as a rolling boulder smashed through the bedroom where the children had been just moments before. One kindergartner who didn’t make it was found close to two miles from his home, in a gulley traced by train tracks close to the waterfront, having been carried there, presumably, on a continuous wave of mud. Two miles.

Each year, globally, between 260,000 and 600,000 people die from smoke from wildfires.

A country of illiterates

The number of atheists in Brazil does not reach 1%.

A country of illiterates

I want to see you educate the elderly in the south? People don't study in the southern periphery of capitalism.

Intellectual destitution - misery - does not disappear from the radar of the drunken macaws.

A country of illiterates

The underdeveloped dragged the atheists into the middle of the fight between Lula supporters and Bolsonaro supporters. Unbelievable.

A place for Fantasy

In the garden history that starts in the Renaissance, the grotto reflected all the turns of taste, all the ideas of the theatre. The grotto as artificial ruin. The grotto as a place for foolery and escapades. (A modern, degraded form of this survives in the fairground's papier-mache Tunnel of Love.) The grotto as showcase. The grotto is, as it were, the innately decadent element of the garden ensemble, the one that is most impure, and most ambiguous. It is a space that is complex and accumulative, dimly lit, thickly ornamented. (An appeal to fantasy, and a likely site for the elaboration of bad taste.)

Grottoes are places of fantasy, but the greatest grotto buildings are, and always have been, functional: from the cryptoportici of the Roman villas (underground passageways one could take from one building to another to avoid the heat of the day), or that stupendous achievement of Roman engineering, the emissarium of Lake Albano (the subject of one of Piranesi's most haunting books of engravings), to such modern fantasy lands as the limestone caves, over six hundred feet long, that house the operations of the Brunson Instrument Company in Kansas City, Missouri; or the miles of underground shopping streets in Osaka or the vast caverns dug in the mountain behind the National Museum in Taipei that store the innumerable art treasures that Chiang Kai-shek made off with when he fled from China to Taiwan in 1949; or the Louvre Metro station in Paris, several stations of the Stockholm subway system, and, above all, the justly celebrated Moscow subway, especially the Mayakovsky and Dynamo stations. Modern technology has made it possible to build below ground on a scale never before feasible: the great subterranean installations are bound to multiply. Grottoes of art, grottoes of industry, grottoes of shopkeeping, grottoes of war — all these are functional and yet seem the epitome of the poetry of space. In grottoes the functional and the fantastic are anything but incompatible. Perhaps that is why the museum for his art collection that Philip Johnson put underground next to his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, seems like the famous house's twin — a house with glass walls demands one that is sunk beneath the ground — but is not convincing as an example of the grotto in the garden: it is too purely functional, stripped down.

Susan Sontag

1933 - 2004

Where the stress falls

What a beautiful and intelligent woman. Susan Sontag writes very well. I am becoming increasingly captivated (more passionate) by American women.

Writing as reading

Writing is a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. To find your own characteristic way of narrating and insisting; that is, to find your own inner freedom.

Necromodernity

Necroeconomy, necrotruth, necroinformation, necrodiagnosis, necrontology, necroheterosexuality, necrohomosexuality, necroaffect, necroimage, necrolove, necrotelevision, necrohospital, necrohumanism, necrostate, necrourbanism, necroprogress, necroliterature, necropaternity, necrojourney, necroEurope, necroindividual, necroarchitecture, necroFrance, necrocountry, necroentertainment, necropeace, necrodiversity, necropolitics, necroterritory, necroborder, necroscience, necromasculinity, necrofemininity, necrocouple, necrobelief, necrolanguage, necrovote, necroschool, necrofamily, nercopornography, necrocongress, necromedicine, necrobeauty, necroculture, necrohouse, necroart, necroauthority, necroresponse, necroexhibition, necroresearch, necrojournalism, necrocinema, necrodesign, necrotourism, necrohistory, necrolandscape, necrocomputer, necroemotion, necroblood, necrocuisine, necroimage, necropragmatism, necrohealth, necroagriculture, necrodesire, necrofashion, necroreason, necrorobotics, necrolaw, necrostimulation, necropedagogy, necrocommunication, necrogeneration, necrogift, necrotest, necroaction, necrosexuality, necrovalue, necroadvertisement, necroidentity, necrohospitality, necroimmunity, necroindustry, necrocommunity, necroorgasm, necroliberty, necromuseum, necrolistening, necrowork, necrofraternity, necroAmerica, necrofetus, necrosatisfaction, necroequality, necroconsumption, necrovision, necrowater, necrosoul, necrofriendship, necromaternity, necroempathy, necrospeed, necroplasticity, necroawareness, necronarrative, necrojoy, necrotransport, necrotheater, necroleisure, necromoney, necrofinance, necrofood, necroChristianity, necro-Islam, necroJudaism, necrocivilization, necroadolescence, necrodebt, necroforgiveness, necrocredit, necrobody, necrocomplicity, necromilk, necroerotics, necrooil, necrosugar, necrosperm, necromythology, necroage, necroalterity, necrodiscourse, necrohappiness, necrotherapy, necrozoo, necromorality, necroperseverance, necrocirculation, necrorace, necroprivacy, necronet, necropublic, necrosubjectivity, necrosovereignty, necroaddiction, necroaccumulation, necrogovernment, necrodance, necrocontract, necropride, necrodirection, necromemory, necrowriting, necroMediterranean, necrochildhood, necrosuccess, necrosex, necropast, necrodream, necroapprenticeship, necroideology, necrohero, necropower, necrobirth, necroknowledge, necroexcitement, necroair, necroministry, necrohonor, necrobreath, necrofuture, necrodomesticity, necro-Disney, necroritual, necrosincerity, necrocareer, necrotraining, necroelection, necrosociety, necrophilosophy, necrodrink, necroreproduction, necrowill, necroinsemination, necrotime, necrocare, necromusic, necrojustice, necrocrisis, necrorepresentation, necroAfrica, necroresilience, necrodignity, necromarriage, necroselfesteem, necrotopia, necrogamy, necroerection, necrohunger, necrointelligence, necrosecurity, necrorights, necrocosmos, necrodetermination, necrobank, necrodemocracy, necroAtlantic, necropsychology, necroarchive, necroMonsanto, necroaesthetics, necrosoftware, necrohardware, necroreality, necroprofitability, necroAmazon, necromarketing, necronegotiation, necroawakening, necroflexibility, necroglobalization, necrosports, necrolife, necrostupidity, necrodialog, necrothirst, necrodiscipline, necroLampedusa, necrogrowth, necrofidelity, necrohygiene, necrosurgery, necrorepublic, necroFacebook, necrophotography, necroprecision, necrobusiness, necrorespect, necrosharing, necroautonomy, necrochange, necrometropolis, necropatience, necroerudition, necroaid, necrotoy, necrodrama, necrokindness, necrocelebration, necroexperience, necroplanet, necroproperty, necroGoogle, necrosurveillance, necrostability, necrocommemoration, necrocolumn, necroappetite, necrofervor, necroamelioration, necroself, necroyou, necrowe...

Can financial capitalism produce anything else? Are we still alive? Do we still want to act?

A country of illiterates

The provincials' agenda turned into a petty holy war.

To excite the mass of illiterates, it is necessary to provoke religious factions. Brazil will never be modern.

Centuries and centuries for Brazil to cease being a laboratory of underdevelopment.

A country of illiterates

In Brazil, the masses are confused, disorderly, and sentimental. A poor vocabulary, a meager imagination — even in the realm of politics.

Centuries for Brazil to undress its impoverishing provincialism.

Candy Crush Rehab

The American Psychiatric Association (which is by no means a congress of saints) requested a few days ago that the phenomenon of Candy Crush Saga, whose number of addicts keeps increasing, be recognized as a national epidemic, and that a virtual crisis center be put into place to help detox from it.

Created by the British company King in 2012, Candy Crush Saga (along with its Asian equivalent Puzzle & Dragons) is the most widely downloaded application in the world. It counts 80 million users and earns 700,000 Euros in profit every day. Video game analysts wonder: how can such an idiotic app, based on multicolored floating sweets, surpass the most sophisticated games developed for years by Nintendo programmers?

But the key to success for Candy Crush lies precisely in its defects: the childlike, inoffensive nature (there’s no violence or sex), the constant beginning-again (there are up to 410 levels), along with the absence of specific cultural content that could arouse acceptance or rejection. Chastity, idiocy and disinterestedness are the conditions for the globalization of dependence.

Candy Crush is a discipline of the soul, an immaterial prison proposing a constant deferral of desire and action. The game is addressed to generic subjects stripped of their secondary social defenses (which might explain why the largest number of players are what we socially call “women”): the game establishes a closed circuit between the limbic brain (which manages emotional memory), the hand, and the screen. Candy Crush is not a training game that exercises the player’s skill in order to improve it. It is a simple game of chance installed in one of our most accessible, intimate external techno-organs: the mobile phone. It’s Las Vegas in the palm of your hand. The aim of Candy Crush is not to teach the users anything, but to capture the totality of their cognitive capacities during a given amount of time and to appropriate their libidinal resources by making the screen into a surrogate masturbatory surface. In Candy Crush, the players never win anything: when they finish one level, it’s the screen that has the orgasm.

What’s more, Candy Crush calls into question the relationship between freedom and “free” defended by supporters of piracy: the new strategy to colonize the virtual world involves creating a game as simple as possible that is offered for free, so that the potential player spends a maximum number of hours online playing it. Once the game has been grafted into the user’s living habits, it’s the time of the game itself and its associated forms of expense (additional lives and boosters) that produce the profits.

The Candy Crush players manage a multiplicity of screens: they are often physically situated facing a computer or TV screen that no longer functions as main visual frame, but rather as peripheral background, while at the same time they maintain a constant to-and-fro between Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Instagram… The chaste contemporary tele-techno-masturbator is like a virtual traffic controller locked in a quixotic control tower from which with one hand they “update” while with the other they arrange the rows of digital sweets.

The apps that can be downloaded from Facebook, Google Play or Apple Store are the new operators of subjectivity. We should be aware of the fact that when we download an app, we don’t install it simply on our mobile phone, but directly onto our cognitive apparatus. While René Schérer teaches us that pedagogical disciplines developed during modernity have served to set the masturbating hand to writing and working, we now understand that the new digital disciplines set the assembly-line hand that used to write and work to masturbate the screen of cognitive capitalism.

Radical exploration of writing

Perhaps the most striking difference between Sartre and Barthes is the deep one, of temperament. Sartre has an intellectually brutal, bon enfant view of the world, a view that wills simplicity, resolution, transparence; Barthes's view is irrevocably complex, self-conscious, refined, irresolute. Sartre was eager, too eager, to seek confrontation, and the tragedy of this great career, of the use he made of his stupendous intellect, was just his willingness to simplify himself. Barthes preferred to avoid confrontation, to evade polarization. He defines the writer as "the watcher who stands at the crossroads of all other discourses".

Radical exploration of writing

Barthes construes writing as an ideally complex form of consciousness: a way of being both passive and active, social and asocial, present and absent in one's own life. His idea of the writer's vocation excludes the sequestration that Flaubert thought inevitable, would appear to deny any conflict between the writer's necessary inwardness and the pleasures of worldliness. Gide supplied Barthes with the patrician model for the writer who is supple, multiple; never strident or vulgarly indignant; generous but also properly egotistical; incapable of being deeply influenced.

Map the intellectual territory

Barthes repeatedly compared teaching to play, reading to eros, writing to seduction. His voice became more and more personal, more full of grain, as he called it; his intellectual art more openly a performance, like that of the other great antisystematizers. For Barthes, as for Nietzsche, the point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached.

Writing is Barthe's perennial subject — indeed, perhaps no one since Flaubert (in his letters) has thought as brilliantly, as passionately as Barthes has about what writing is.

Writing itself

Barthe’s writing, with its prodigious variety of subjects, has finally one great subject: writing itself.

Barthes was endeavor was the quintessentially literary one: the writer organizing, under a series of doctrinal auspices, the theory of his own mind.

Barthes was an inspired, ingenious practitioner of the essay and the anti-essay — he had a resistance to long forms. Typically, his sentences are complex, comma-ridden and colon-prone, packed with densely worded entailments of ideas deployed as if these were the materials of a supple prose. It is a style of exposition, recognizably French, whose parent tradition is to be found in the tense, idiosyncratic essays published between the two world wars in the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise — a perfected version of the NRFs house style which can deliver more ideas per page while retaining the brio of that style, its acuteness of timbre. His vocabulary is large, fastidious, fearlessly mandarin. Even Barthes's less fleet, more jargon-haunted writings — most of them from the 1960s — are full of flavor; he manages to make an exuberant use of neologisms. While exuding straight-ahead energy, his prose constantly reaches for the summative formulation; it is irrepressibly aphoristic. (Indeed, one could go through Barthes's work extracting superb bits — epigrams, maxims — to make a small book, as has been done with Wilde and Proust.) Barthes's strengths as an aphorist suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the perception of structure. A method of condensed assertion by means of symmetrically counterposed terms, the aphorism displays the symmetries and complementarities of situations or ideas — their design, their shape. Like a markedly greater feeling for drawings than for paintings, a talent for aphorism is one of the signs of what could be called the formalist temperament.

Continent, city, country

American women are very cultured and extremely intelligent.

The Poor and the Proletariat

Charlie Chaplin's latest gag has been to transfer half of his Soviet prize into the funds of the Abbé Pierre. At bottom, this amounts to establishing an identity between the nature of the poor man and that of the proletarian. Chaplin has always seen the proletarian under the guise of the poor man: hence the broadly human force of his representations but also their political ambiguity. This is quite evident in this admirable film, Modern Times, in which he repeatedly approaches the proletarian theme, but never endorses it politically. What he presents us with is the proletarian still blind and mystified, defined by the immediate character of his needs, and his total alienation at the hands of his masters (the employers and the police).

For Chaplin, the proletarian is still the man who is hungry; the representations of hunger are always epic with him: excessive size of the sandwiches, rivers of milk, fruit which one tosses aside hardly touched. Ironically, the food-dispensing machine (which is part of the employers' world) delivers only fragmented and obviously flavourless nutriment. Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-Man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police. Historically, Man according to Chaplin roughly corresponds to the worker of the French Restoration, rebelling against the machines, at a loss before strikes, fascinated by the problem of bread-winning (in the literal sense of the word), but as yet unable to reach a knowledge of political causes and an insistence on a collective strategy.

But it is precisely because Chaplin portrays a kind of primitive proletarian, still outside Revolution, that the representative force of the latter is immense. No socialist work has yet succeeded in expressing the humiliated condition of the worker with so much violence and generosity. Brecht alone, perhaps, has glimpsed the necessity, for socialist art, of always taking Man on the eve of Revolution, that is to say, alone, still blind, on the point of having his eyes opened to the revolutionary light by the "natural" excess of his wretchedness. Other works, in showing the worker already engaged in a conscious fight, subsumed under the Cause and the Party, give an account of a political reality which is necessary, but lacks aesthetic force.

Now Chaplin, in conformity with Brecht's idea, shows the public its blindness by presenting at the same time a man who is blind and what is in front of him. To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see: thus, at a Punch and Judy show, it is the children who announce to Punch what he pretends not to see. For instance, Charlie Chaplin is in a cell, pampered by the warders, and lives there according to the ideal of the American petit-bourgeois: with legs crossed, he reads the paper under a portrait of Lincoln; but his delightfully selfsatisfied posture discredits this ideal completely, so that it is no longer possible for anyone to take refuge in it without noticing the new alienation which it contains. The slightest ensnarements are thus made harmless, and the man who is poor is repeatedly cut off from temptation. All told, it is perhaps because of this that Chaplin-Man triumphs over everything: because he escapes from everything, eschews any kind of sleeping partner, and never invests in man anything but man himself. His anarchy, politically open to discussion, perhaps represents the most efficient form of revolution in the realm of art.

Roland Barthes

1915 - 1980

The delinquents

The delinquents
To me are horrible creatures

Standing on street corners 

And carrying knives 

And inspiring terror in the heart of the casual passerby. 

We are not at all friendly 

And I avoid Such illiterate confrères 

Feeling that my gift for language 

Entitles me to other rewards 

Than are theirs 

For which I thank my teachers 

And my early editors

Carl Solomon

1928 - 1993

A country of illiterates

Scientific-philosophical discourse is not part of the lives of the of the Brazilian people. People shout; they don't know how to converse. They were not taught to be polite.

A country of illiterates

What kind of experience does the underdeveloped person have in their ugly and dirty cities other than drinking and doing drugs? Gossip? Bullshit? Yell? Lie?

A mind in mourning

Is literary greatness still possible? Given the implacable devolution of literary ambition, and the concurrent ascendancy of the tepid, the glib, and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects, what would a noble literary enterprise look like now?

Fiction and factuality are not opposed. One of the founding claims for the novel in English is that it is a true history. What makes a work fiction is not that the story is untrue — it may well be true, in part or in whole — but its use, or extension, of a variety of devices (including false or forged documents) which produce what literary theorists call "the effect of the real".

Questions of travel

Continent, city, country, society:
The choice is never wide and never free. 

And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home, 

wherever that may be?

Elizabeth Bishop 

1911 - 1979

Porque não me ufano

O peso neonazista está sendo subestimado. A extrema direita não é insignificante. Assaltou São Paulo e vai continuar no poder. E vai assaltar o sul por completo. Uma província marcada pelo desemprego, pobreza e uma educação limitada, os partidos xenófobos e populistas conseguem votações consideráveis entre os cristãos. Ainda há na estrutura pública nacional uma nostalgia que valoriza as "realizações positivas" do nazismo. O miliciano fundamentalista foi a sua maior expressão e deixou sucessores por todos os poros da periferia do capitalismo.

Mein Kampf está entre nós. A bíblia nazista representa a negação da sociedade democrática, das liberdades fundamentais, do Iluminismo, do progressismo, da igualdade entre os indivíduos. Mein Kampf ainda percorre o submundo do inconsciente coletivo dos subdesenvolvidos.

A barbárie ainda convive facilmente com a plutocracia nacional. O nazismo aninhou-se nas falhas da democracia e conseguiu assentos nas estruturas públicas. 

Um futuro ditador está em gestação. E será endeusado por milhões de pobres e ignorantes do terceiro mundo.

A country of illiterates

Scientific-philosophical discourse is not part of the lives of the representatives of the Brazilian people.

The Window

you are my bread

and the hairline 

noise 

of my bones 

you are almost 

the sea

you are not stone 

or molten sound 

I think 

you have no hands

this kind of bird flies backward 

and this love 

breaks on a windowpane 

where no light talks

this is not time 

for crossing tongues 

(the sand here 

never shifts)

I think 

tomorrow 

turned you with his toe 

and you will 

shine 

and shine 

unspent and underground

Diane di Prima

1934 - 2020

A critic at large

Nietzsche to have said that his favorite novel was Tristam Shandy is not quite as original a judgment as it may seem. Sterne has been an especially potent presence in the literatures of the Slavic languages as is reflected in the centrly of the example of Tristam Shandy in the theories of Shklovsky and other Russian formalists, from the nineteen-twenties foward. Perhaps the reason so much commanding prose literature has been issuing for decades from Central and Eastern Europe is not only that writers there have been suffering under monstrous tyrannies and therefore have had importance, seriousness, subjects, relevant irony bestowed on them (as many writers in Western Europe and the United States have half-enviously concluded) but also that these are the parts of the world where for over a century the author of Tristam Shandy has been the most admired.