Douglas House (Harbor Springs, Michigan)
Richard Meier
completed 1973
(Source: kidsamich)
Number 2003 11.26.11
This is absolutely lovely. It pains me that my distance from blogging is now such that I have nothing particularly interesting to say about a photograph that is plainly loaded with thematic and formal intricacies (e.g. the way the reflected building and the reflecting building are at such — imagined — perpendicular angle to each other; the way the two colors are almost complementary; the clash of modern coolness and old earthiness; the wavy distortion set behind/within/upon a hyper-regular grid; etc.), despite the fact that I think that (a) the photograph is interesting, and (b) I’m a guy who often (sometimes?) has interesting things to say about interesting things, of which this is, as previously stated, one.
Ugh. I guess you’ll just have to settle for that “e.g.” as far as aesthetic insight is concerned. But suffice it to say: I love this photo.
Gattaca [1997, Andrew Niccol]
A compelling, direct-of-purpose bioethical parable with a vaguely retro/noir aesthetic that somehow comes across as naturalistic and unforced. This is what I would call a quiet movie; it has enormously important themes, wrenching performances and all the trappings of an epic, but it somehow lives in my memory as a subtle chamber play more than a dystopian extravaganza…
Though not very successful at the time of its release, Gattaca has found a fruitful afterlife as a bioethical case study and as that film that your biology teacher will inevitably show you on the last day of class before vacation, when there’s really nothing else to do, and, hell, he might as well let you have fun while hopefully teaching you something at the same time ha ha ha. And while I generally resent the kind of content-over-form films whose gee-whiz nature endears them to teachers, I would submit that Gattaca is didactically useful not because it is in itself didactic or essayistic, but rather because it distills nuanced moral scenarios into images of such melancholy elegance that no one — not smarmy teachers, not students, not cinephiles — is immune.
(Source: eugenehl)
![Gattaca [1997, Andrew Niccol]
A compelling, direct-of-purpose bioethical parable with a vaguely retro/noir aesthetic that somehow comes across as naturalistic and unforced. This is what I would call a quiet movie; it has enormously important themes, wrenching performances and all the trappings of an epic, but it somehow lives in my memory as a subtle chamber play more than a dystopian extravaganza…
Though not very successful at the time of its release, Gattaca has found a fruitful afterlife as a bioethical case study and as that film that your biology teacher will inevitably show you on the last day of class before vacation, when there’s really nothing else to do, and, hell, he might as well let you have fun while hopefully teaching you something at the same time ha ha ha. And while I generally resent the kind of content-over-form films whose gee-whiz nature endears them to teachers, I would submit that Gattaca is didactically useful not because it is in itself didactic or essayistic, but rather because it distills nuanced moral scenarios into images of such melancholy elegance that no one — not smarmy teachers, not students, not cinephiles — is immune.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljdllkPP9n1qd68j7o1_1280.png)
A staircase by the Italian designer and architect Alessandro Mendini, at the Groninger Museum in Groningen (Netherlands.)
We live in an ugly, hyper-ironized, sickly sweet, vaguely futuristic world of commodified art and arty commodities, a world where we are all to a certain extent narcotized by a glut of tiny images and ideas that all compete with each other, that all drown each other out, that all contribute to the low-key headache of modernity, that blind us with light and color and the lure of a destination — while, behind the glare, the barbaric machinery of history and violence and human sadness and mass disenfranchisement chugs along, unhindered and unquestioned.
We might as well have staircases that — in their overstimulated ugliness, pointlessness, prettiness and false promise — match the vile world we live in…
(via arrow-tea-deactivated20120708)
