March 20, 2006
Paradise Now
Dated: March 20, 2006
SOURCE: The Guardian
The world was in disarray, shattered by the first world war and heading into a second. Out of this chaos came the modernists - a group of utopian designers with thrilling new visions of what the future could hold. But was anyone ready for this brave new world? Robert Hughes introduces the key players of modernism - and discovers how many of their dreams still survive.
Modernism is a weasel of a word, whose meanings slip and slide. They always have. Not that one should use "modernism" and "always" in the same sentence. Nobody talked or thought about modernism in the middle ages - the idea of a battle between "new" and "established" cultural forms was not an issue then. Now it has gone completely the other way. Nobody, or nobody with brains, assigns a missionary role to culture. The work of art is just one more consumer product among others.
Modernism is something old that we look back on, not without nostalgia. Its ashtrays and dinner sets, the chrome-tube-and-leather-strap Marcel Breuer chairs, get revived and recirculated without comment. The idea of modernism connotes some kind of ideal and even quasi-official mindset. Seen in one light, it even suggests too much solidity: think of how the innumerable descendants and clones of Mies van der Rohe created, in their high, bland cliffs of steel and glass, the face of American corporate capitalism.
That certainly wasn't the modernité Charles Baudelaire was thinking of in 1863 when, in The Painter of Modern Life, he described "modernity" as an exaltation of "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable". Nor was it what Jonathan Swift complained of in a letter to Alexander Pope - the work of English scribblers "who send us over their trash in Prose and Verse, with abominable curtailings and quaint modernisms". That was in 1737, and was the first and probably the last time that "modernism" and "quaintness" were linked in the same sentence. The essence of modernism, to the early 20th century, when its lessons really began to catch on, would be that it was anti-quaint: clear, clean, stripped as a piston, dealing only in essentials. But by "quaint" Swift meant something more like "bizarre" - he wasn't thinking of picturesqueness.
Once, movements and works that no longer seem to match up with modernism as we understand it used to call themselves modernist. In Barcelona, the modernists were architects like Josep Puig I Cadafalch, Lluís Domènech I Montaner and even Antoni Gaudi, all of whose work fairly groaned beneath the weight of its historical references, exuberant natural detail and symbolic narratives - the very opposite of what people at the Bauhaus were thinking about. Would you call a concert-house ceiling encrusted with giant polychrome pottery roses, each the size of a cabbage, "modernist"? But that was what Domenech, the star of Catalan modernism, did in his masterpiece, the Palace of Catalan Music, a building almost unimaginably remote from the products and ideas of northern modernist architects and theorists like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who wanted to strip all ornament from buildings and, like Euclid, "look on Beauty bare".
For the full article, click here.
Posted by andrewanissi at 06:16 PM
February 12, 2006
Winter
by Andrew A. Anissi
The real reason I love winter is that it forces humanity to come face to face with Nature and respect its power and beauty. Maybe people do that anyway, but not in Manhattan, where all natural aspects of the island were flattened out and replaced with total artificiality. On a winter weekend in Manhattan, snowy as it is today, only the brave and strong are confident enough to venture outdoors, while the weak and the lacking in spirit huddle together crying for Nature to relent and provide an atmosphere of total comfort so that they can go back to ignoring it.
Posted by andrewanissi at 01:46 PM
December 09, 2005
Sol Invictus: The Persian and Roman Origin of Christmas
by Andrew A. Anissi
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The yearly rebirth of Mithra was viewed as a yearly renewal of the Roman Empire. Mithra, by the way, was born on December 25, of a virgin. His birth was witnessed by shepherds and magicians [magi]. Mithra raised the dead and healed the sick and cast out demons. He returned to heaven at the spring equinox and before doing so had a last supper with his 12 disciples (representing the 12 signs of the zodiac), eating mizd, a piece of bread marked with a cross (an almost universal symbol of the sun). Sound familiar?
Between 320 or 353 C.E., during the reign of Emperor Constantine, the Church decreed that December 25 would become the standard day of observance for the birth of Christ, since this date had long been recognized in antiquity as the return of the sun. Christmas, during the early centuries, was the most variable of the Christian feast days, and was often confused with the Epiphany, and celebrated in the months of April and May. Pope Julius I, in the fourth century commanded a committee of bishops to establish the date of the nativity of Jesus. December 25 (the day of Sol Invictus, the invincible sun) was decided upon. Not coincidentally, that is the day when the "pagan world celebrated the birth of their Sun Gods-Egyptian Osiris, Greek Apollo and Bacchus, Chaldean Adonis, Persian Mithra-when the Zodiacal sign of Virgo (the sun is born of a virgin) rose on the horizon. Thus the ancient festival of the Winter Solstice, the pagan festival of the birth of the Sun, came to be adopted by the Christian Church as the nativity of Jesus, and was called Christmas" (Crosbie). The church found itself:
By the end of the fourth century the whole Christian world was celebrating Christmas on that day, with the exception of the Eastern churches, where it was celebrated on January 6. The choice of December 25 was probably influenced by the fact that on this day the Romans celebrated the Mithraic feast of the Sun-god (natalis solis invicti), and that the Saturnalia also came at this time
Further, according to Annie Besant:
He is always born at the winter solstice, after the shortest day in the year, at the midnight of the 24th December when the sign Virgo is rising above the horizon; born as this Sign is rising, he is born always of a virgin, and she remains a virgin after she has given birth to her Sun-child as the celestial Virgo remains unchanged and unsullied when the Sun comes forth from her in the Heavens. Weak, feeble as an infant is he, born when the days are shortest and the nights are longest....(qtd. in Bailey)
The connection to the sun as a solar deity, the light and soul of the world, when it is reborn at the winter solstice, became the birthday of Christ, and he is but one manifestation of many ancient archetypal savior deities.
Posted by andrewanissi at 03:14 PM
October 10, 2005
Einstein was wrong. General relativity explains astrophysics, without the need for dark matter or Special Relativity
Posted by Hemos on Monday October 10, @10:30AM on Slashdot
from the all-einstein-quotes-you-know-are-wrong dept.
dr. loser writes "The CERN newsletter reports that a new PAPER by scientists at the University of Victoria has demonstrated that one of the prime observational justifications for the existence of dark matter can be explained without any dark matter at all, by a proper use of general relativity! What does this imply for cosmology and particle physics, both of which have been worrying about other aspects of dark matter?"
Posted by andrewanissi at 03:18 PM