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• 19 Oct 2009 11:56

  Belmont Park Lisette Model 1956

  October 19, 2009 Rome Lisette Model 1901 - 1983 Lisette Model Photographer and Teacher _______________________ Open Access Week (October 19-23, 2009) Open Access events in Ottawa Carleton University, University of Ottawa and IDRC (International Development Research Centre) have collaborated to provide a suite of programs to celebrate Open Access Week via Peter Suber Open Access News _______________________ Shadow Play Tom Clark (....) Click Memory, unwanted, unexpected Images Display; pasts come flooding in, slow, Flicking yellow glow on endarkened wall. Hello Interior landscape we've always Traveled, Dear One, by a Lake of Dreams -- looking For that light-in-window fleeting house Now a cottage haunted by passing strangers Who were never there. The night's cold, Bells do not toll here at midnight any more. ...(more) _______________________ Window, New York c. 1939-1945 Lisette Model _______________________ 101 If our life were an eternal standing by the window, if we could remain there for ever, like hovering smoke, with the same moment of twilight forever paining the curve of the hills.... If we could remain that way for beyond forever! If at least on this side of the impossible we could thus continue, without committing and action, without our pallid lips sinning another word! Look how it's getting dark! ...The positive quietude of everthing fills me with rage, with something that's a bitterness in the air I breathe. My soul aches ... A slow wisp of smoke rises and dissipates in the distance... A restless tedium makes me think no more of you... All so superfluous! We and the world and the mystery of both.   -  Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet _______________________ _______________________ Sliding Trombone Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes translated by David Gascoyne I have a little windmill on my head Which draws up water to my mouth and eyes When I am hungry or moved to tears I have a little horn full of the odour of absinth in my ears And on my nose a green parakeet that flaps its wings And cries 'Aux Armes' When from the sky fall the seeds of the sun The absence from the heart of steel At the bottom of the boneless and stagnant realities Is partial to crazy sea-fish I am the captain and the alsatian at the cinema I have in my belly a little agricultural machine That reaps and binds electric flex The cocoanuts thrown by the melancholy monkey Fall like spittle into the water Where they blossom again as petunias I have in my stomach an ocarina and I have virginal faith I feed my poet on the feet of a pianist Whose teeth are even and uneven And sad Sunday evenings I throw my morganatic dreams To the loving turtle-doves who laugh like hell. French surrealist poetry In English translation by David Gascoyne _______________________ Reno Lisette Model 1949 _______________________ Minuscule Things William Matthews There’s a crack in this glass so fine we can’t see it, and in the blue eye of the candleflame’s needle there’s a dark fleck, a speck of imperfection that could contain, like a microchip, an epic treatise on beauty, except it’s in the eye of the beheld. And at the base of our glass there’s nothing so big as a tiny puddle, but an ooze, a viscous patina like liquefied tarnish. It’s like a text so short it consists only of the author’s signature, which has to stand, like the future, for what might have been: a novel, let’s say, thick with ambiguous life. Its hero forgets his goal as he nears it, so that it’s like rain evaporating in the very sight of parched Saharans on the desert floor. There, by chance, he meets a thirsty and beautiful woman. What a small world! _______________________ Rome Lisette Model _______________________ Constant Vision Lebbeus Woods Some time ago, I was speaking with Peter Cook, the founder of Archigram, about the Situationists and, in particular, Constant Nieuwenhuys—the artist and visionary architect—and he told me a story. “In 1959 or ’60, Mike Webb (a founding member of Archigram) and I attended a lecture given by Constant on his “New Babylon” project. We were just graduating from architecture school, but Mike leaned over to me during the lecture and whispered “we can do it better!” And so, a couple of years later, they did it at least differently, setting off a revolution in architecture that reverberates to the present day. What both Constant and Archigram did was imagine architecture as a leading instrument of social change, through the making of ideal or utopian architectural projects. The difference between them is that the projects and the ideals they expressed stand on opposite sides of a cultural divide. This takes a bit of explaining.(....) New Babylon was inspired by and contributed to the work of the Situationists, a group of intellectuals, theorists and writers, as well as artists who were anything but Modernists in the classic capitalist mold. They were inspired by the irrational forms and practices of Dada and Surrealism, and were what we can could call neo-Marxists, meaning inspired by Marx’s vision of revolutionary socialism but seeking to use the capitalist system to achieve their ends. Guy Debord and others invented tactics such as derive, psychogeographie, and detournment, which seized upon then subverted capitalist notions to develop radical ways of living that were to culminate in revolution (Archigram first heard of these through Constant’s lecture, no doubt). Constant joined the Situationists early on and became their architect, much the same as Antonio Sant’Elia had done with the Futurists, half a century before. The spaces of New Babylon were intended to be spaces of disorientation and of reorientation, from rational, functionalist society to one that is liberated and self-inventing. It was meant to replace capitalist exploitation of human labor and emotion with anarchist celebration of them. Its architecture was to provide a complex armature on which could be woven endlessly new, unpredictably personal urban experiences, determined by ever-changing individual desires. In the end, however, the architecture of the New Babylon seemed to overwhelm such playful, radical spontaneity by its sheer weight and monumental scale. Is Constant’s epic project of other than historical interest today? I believe it is. Aside from the visual strength and sometimes poetic nuances of his models, paintings and drawings, New Babylon raises many questions related to issues of contemporary interest. What role can architecture play in social and political change? What role should an architect take in determining the direction and character of change? How important is the design of space in the whole mix of human activity? Can design “change the world?” If so, who should control it? Constant and New Babylon can still inspire us—as THEY once did the young Peter Cook and Michael Webb—in spirit, if not in form....(more) permanent link

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