Architecture has adopted an“International Style” of featureless walls, horizontal windows, concrete, and metal. One problem: It’s horribly unsuited to human beings... strange trends of odd designs
Life is a short word.
The ephemeral is surprising,
its sound protruding from lips.
Family man
of clear-cut values
for community justice
tattooed on his forehead
Visionary, advisor and strategist
Friend of many,
generational guide
of leaders to come,
his contagious smile,
even in the corridors, pulsates.
Welcoming words and conviction
in unison
gush from his heart.
Images of the youth
in his hands
Teacher of a thousand words
for eternity
Unidos for a goal:
development, inclusion,
freedom
Above all, the right
to be happy
Let him live forever
in our hearts.
Celebrated tonight,
leader of leaders,
Albert Jacquez,
rest in peace.
Vanity Fair’s Best Books of the Year
One thing that is immediately striking about The Necessity of Theater is the elegance of its intellectual design. Woodruff begins with the hypothesis that theater is the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching in measure time and place. That is, theater is art of being watched and watching. This distinction between being watched and watching, then, provides Woodruff with the means to, on the one hand, examine the elements that go into making theater, and, on the other hand, the elements that go into watching or appreciating theater.
Creating theater involves making something worth watching—something that will hold the audience's attention. What sorts of things command our attention? Human action, notably as it is organized in terms of a plot which Woodruff, like Aristotle, emphasizes must be of a magnitude sufficient to be cognitively manageable. Since actions require choices, Woodruff follows his analysis of plot, naturally enough, with a discussion of the choices that give rise to those actions for much the same reason that Aristotle includes dialogue as one of the components of tragedy.
- "How can a double success be a failure?" -- a variant on one of Parfit's thought experiments forms the basis of the Netflix show "Living With Yourself"
- Complaining, done well, can bring us closer together -- Kathryn Norlock (Trent) defends complaints, be they about large scale political issues or "quotidian whinging"
Culture, which includes 'art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions, and beliefs,' is an overlooked element in rebuilding cities ravaged by disasters, war, and other forms of urban distress"
THIS SEEMS WORTH A LOOK: A decade on earth captured from space
- The 2019 Optical Illusion of the Year -- it's the "Dual Axis Illusion" by Frank Force
The Man Who Made “Cats” And What He Was Thinking
“Like all stories, it’s just about cats, but none of these stories work without the big issues underneath. Eliot was writing as much about humans as cats; he was writing about humans through a feline prism. Ultimately, why I wanted human cats, not actual cats, [in the film] was that, if they’d been actual cats, it would have totally missed the point of the duality of the poetry.” – The Atlantic
KING OF COMEDY UPDATE: Six Lessons That Jussie Smollett Taught Us About America’s Culture War in 2019.
(Classical reference in headline.)