[gallery] smithsonianlibraries:
“not compatible with iOS devices”from Animal mechanism: a treatise on terrestrial and aerial locomotion (1874)
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David Hockney, on his favorite drawing:There’s a drawing by Rembrandt, I think it’s the greatest drawing ever done. It’s in the British Museum and it’s of a family teaching a child to walk, so it’s a universal thing, everybody has experienced this or seen it happen. Everybody. I used to print out Rembrandt drawings big and give them to people and say: “If you find a better drawing send it to me.”And:“I used to say to people, ‘I have a reproduction of the best drawing ever made in my pocket’ and I would pull it out and I would convince them, within a minute, that it was the best. It is a Rembrant from the British Museum of a little family teaching a little girl to walk. Everybody at home has a picture like that. The Rembrant, for me, tells me about who you are. I’m looking at the marks and I can feel his arm. That wouldn’t be possible with a photograph – it would be a performance. Rembrant was not intervening in any way, meaning it is the greatest work of art. You don’t see it at first. It is a virtuoso drawing but it doesn’t shout out.”And:When I look at these marks, I know a Chinese master of the seventeenth century would recognise instantly that this drawing was the work of a master. Very few people could get near this… The tenderness this drawing shows is not possible with photography.
To all of us, I believe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Roman Empire is like a mirror in which we see reflected the brutal, vulgar, powerful yet despairing image of our technological civilization, an imperium which now covers the entire globe, for all nations, capitalist, socialist, and communist, are united in their worship of mass, technique and temporal power. What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash but that … it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth or hope.
[gallery] From this collection of optical illusions. Look at the hi-res version to get the full effect.
I came originally from a place that had a serious cool deficit, so I really became a nerdish tabulator of cool. As a writer, I wanted to know how it worked because I judged it to be one of the only engines of global commerce that I had any talent for deconstructing.
[gallery] The source of this impasse is the design itself—a signature work of the overpraised architect Frank Gehry, whose whispered name is enough to raise goose pimples from the (wise and learned) hides of postmodernist aesthetes like the Fine Arts commissioners. It’s worth noting that the laborers who are charged with actually building his designs have a rather different reaction, as across the globe one overpriced Gehry creation after another spouts leaks, shows sudden and mysterious stains, and sends loosened objects flying off his innovative surfaces onto innocent passersby. Maybe this accounts for the first stirrings of an overdue anti-Gehry consensus forming among international tastemakers. Facing a hostile question at a press conference in Spain recently, Gehry responded by raising his middle finger. Artists often speak in symbols.
As the bodies charged with approving his design have raised humble, incremental objections, very delicately—nobody wants to get flipped off by a starchitect!—Gehry has made the minimum adjustments necessary. But the design’s essential absurdity remains: a vast urban rectangle dotted at the edges with 80-foot columns and enclosing great marble boxes of mysterious purpose. If anything, the absurdity may have increased with each revision. The too-high columns were silly enough when they served to hoist enormous metal scrims depicting scenes from Ike’s home state of Kansas; now Gehry has eliminated two of the three screens but the columns are still there, standing lonely and functionless, like the ruins of an ancient temple blown up by art critics.
[gallery] During the session for the seminal “Great Balls Of Fire”, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sun Records boss Sam Phillips engaged in an impassioned, drunken theological dispute about rock’n’roll, the singer worried that he might be leading people away from God.
The subsequent recording is one of rock’s most charged performances, the outburst of a man who suspects he may be condemning himself to burn in hell, but just can’t help himself. “Well, we’ll know one day,” he tells biographer Rick Bragg. “That’s what worries me.”
School, by its very nature, tends to make a total claim on the time and energies of its participants. This, in turn, makes the teacher into custodian, preacher, and therapist.In each of these three roles the teacher bases his authority on a different claim. The teacher-as-custodian acts as a master of ceremonies, who guides his pupils through a drawn-out labyrinthine ritual. He arbitrates the observance of rules and administers the intricate rubrics of initiation to life. At his best, he sets the stage for the acquisition of some skill as schoolmasters always have. Without illusions of producing any profound learning, he drills his pupils in some basic routines.
The teacher-as-moralist substitutes for parents, God, or the state. He indoctrinates the pupil about what is right or wrong, not only in school but also in society at large. He stands in loco parentis for each one and thus ensures that all feel themselves children of the same state.
The teacher-as-therapist feels authorized to delve into the personal life of his pupil in order to help him grow as a person. When this function is exercised by a custodian and preacher, it usually means that he persuades the pupil to submit to a domestication of his vision of truth and his sense of what is right.
The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life. A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.
And that’s where the problem lies. We’re still behaving like the rebel alliance, but now we’re the Empire. We got where we are by ignoring outsiders and believing in ourselves even when nobody else would. The decades have proved that our way was largely right and the critics were wrong, so our habit of not listening has become deeply entrenched. It even became a bit of a bonding ritual to attack critics of the culture because they usually didn’t understand what we were doing beyond a surface level. It didn’t used to matter because nobody except a handful of forum readers would see the rants. The same reflex becomes a massive problem now that nerds wield real power. GamerGate made me ashamed to be a gamer, but the scary thing is that the underlying behavior of attacking critics felt like something I’d always seen in our culture, and tolerated. It only shocked me when it was scaled up so massively into rape and death threats, and I saw mainstream corporations like Intel folding in the face of the pressure we can bring to bear.