sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
sansampersamp
2mo ago
What's the counterfactual here? Michael Bay still makes four-quadrant films. Top Gun: Maverick is a four-quadrant film. The original Star Wars trilogy were four-quadrant films. I can think of far fewer big films that tried to go hard on the two female quadrants (e.g. Twilight) than went hard on the two male ones, especially now that we're out of the romcom era. Joker is a two-quadrant film on the other axis because of its rating, not deliberate alienation of women, where it hit broadly the same 60-40 splits as the typical comic-book movie (e.g. Captain Marvel, Spider-man Homecoming).
sansampersamp
2mo ago
Yes, and it's ebbed since that decade as well. See swift/kelce, cringe-coding of 'sportsball', and the post-hipster, post-r-slash-atheism, cultural turn in general.
sansampersamp
2mo ago
Joker was a remake of Scorsese's The King of Comedy, more than it was referencing Taxi Driver.
As if they're taking a swipe at the audience themselves for liking someone they weren't supposed to.
You are 'supposed' to be sympathetic to Arthur. With scant exception, you are 'supposed' to be sympathetic to any protagonist, good or bad, but they spend considerable time rationalising him as a character in Joker. The text as written does center typical anti-capitalist grievances more than it does incel ones. The intended message is more proximate to "the Joker is a product of underfunded social services", than sexlessness. The closest analogue to the film's denouement isn't found in Taxi Driver or Fight Club, it's in the (insufferable, imo) Sorry to Bother You.
I find this assumed audience in the quote a bit odd, accordingly: is the media wrong about the movie being a paean to downtrodden inceldom or does the audience for the film in fact consist of power-fantacising incels. I'd assumed a degree of consensus around the former, though I've been seeing some partisan inversion lately on the idea of stochastic terrorism more generally, so who knows.
sansampersamp
2mo ago
If it wasn't clear, I don't live in a country with as adversarial a relationship with the cops as the US, but I have a shortcut to pin the app on open, kiosk mode. I've never had to use it in the 2 ish years it's been available but I understand the ID verification flow doesn't require a phone to be handed over, just a QR code displayed and scanned.
sansampersamp
2mo ago
We now have recognised digital drivers' licenses on your phone, but to be honest I wasn't carrying one before then anyway. A wallet is just one more thing to carry, everything is on the phone. An ID isn't necessary to fly domestically here either, so it's easily left at home as well. I'd currently need to use cash maybe once every two years.
I don't think it is generally representative of Eisenman's philosophy, no. It's worth remembering that these two architects are separated by half a century and the pacific ocean, and that gulf encompasses significant aesthetic, philosophical, cultural and technological developments. I don't know a huge amount about Nikken Sekkei other than them being one of those very old mega-firms that built Tokyo tower had their heyday in the 80s, so I can't speak much to a house style or philosophy, but as I mentioned it seems more in dialogue with Ando than Eisenmannian deconstruction, even if both are pursuing a kind of phenomenological minimalism. Japan also has its own aesthetic philosophies against which Japanese architects play and react. Eisenman never struck me as someone with a huge interest in materiality or light, and his work is explicitly antitectonic in places (a result of Derrida-esque attempts to liberate signifier from signified). The gymnasium is thoroughly tectonic and materiality is clearly front of mind, which is why the care is taken to showcase the formwork. Where the gymnasium bears the marks of its construction process, Eisenman's House VI is a house in abstract, the planes of its walls pushed and pulled without caring to represent the construction process, or even to subvert it. The (mild) parametricism is also an aesthetic development contingent on software-led design processes that simply didn't exist in Eisenman's context.
I do agree that there is a sometimes challenging, sometimes productive interplay between what positively evokes nature and what evokes decay, but I don't think it's as straightforward as béton brut surfaces always and necessarily giving a sense of grime, or that grime necessarily is of negative valence. In Tanizaki's essay on Japanese aesthetics, there is a special attention paid to grime:
Surely this has something to do with our national character. We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity.
Of course, this "sheen of antiquity" of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime.
...
I suppose I shall sound terribly defensive if I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it, while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize it. Yet for better or worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.
Tanizaki was writing with his tongue in his cheek (much ink is spent on the virtues of wooden toilets), but I do think brutalist structures put decay on an aesthetic knife-edge more than most. I've never seen a brutalist building work when left to impose its monolithic mass on an urban parking lot, but I love how this tension between artifice and nature is completely released in da Rocha's Casa no Butantã. The raw concrete is humanised by surrendering it to the jungle. Appropriately used, decay functions to soften edges, blur boundaries. When homeownership can often feel like a constant, doomed struggle against entropy, a design that reassesses the necessity of this opposition can be incredibly liberating.
I think with your prison cell examples the worst are actually where this tension is amplified, rather than released. I'd certainly find a mess of shit and viscera unpleasant on a dirt cave floor, but would find it significantly more disturbing on broken white tile under fluorescent lights. This is just to illustrate that these qualities, and their humaneness, aren't simple variables to dial up and down, but interplay with each other in context.
Back to the gymnasium, and it wasn't I that picked it as a particular exemplar of anything, I agree that many of the circulation spaces are not particularly inspiring, and the classroom probably the most egregious. But I can see to some extent what they are aiming for, and it is something rather different from what Eisenman pursued. I think it's possible for a design to work in some contexts and not others, and with a design that's on such a knife's edge as this (and I consider it flawed in a few ways), it'd be somewhat miraculous to transport it to a prison typology with the intended effect intact. The one saving grace, if you could call it that, is that the baseline for these environments is already dire. A fancy private school is going to have a slightly different attitude to upkeep as well.
sansampersamp
2mo ago
gymnasium is designed to look like a WW2 bomb shelter that's been riddled with shell holes
This is a funny comparison since my high school gymnasium literally was a a massive concrete structure that was bombed in WW2, which followed its original use as part of an abattoir complex. It was fine, aesthetically, if a bit reverberant, and I don't believe it left any psychic scars on myself or other kids. As a concrete structure built for an actual industrial purpose it was also incredibly, obviously different to that Japanese gymnasium. No one was bothering with sandblasting planks to get 3mm of grain relief in the formwork, I assure you.
sansampersamp
2mo ago
That Nikken Sekkei gymnasium was the first example linked to in the OP claim that 'discomforting' architecture was being used in schools. I wouldn't really call it within Eisenman's style, it's much more contemporary than that. It also bears little resemblance to any of the prison cell pictures, which increase in unpleasantness largely with the cheapness and decay of the fixtures, and the dirt and squalor of their upkeep. The gymnasium is very carefully done and very clean, at least in these photos. The materiality and texture of the wooden formwork is trying to emphasise the cavernous qualities of the inner volume. They also realise that these textures perform best under lighting conditions that play light across the surfaces instead of directly onto them. It looks to me to be a little self-conscious though; it's in clear dialogue with Tadao Ando but I don't know if their sidestep into parametricism with the holes as a deviation from him has succeeded. I'd have liked to see them push it a little further and embrace the meteoric affect a bit more, and potentially tie that in with more gradated kinds of permeability (e.g. enabling overwatch of the inner volume from the gantry with a wider range of perforations). I'm not sure how effective the baffles on the roof will be at muting the acoustics either. At the end of the day, though, if I was a teenager playing basketball, I'd vastly prefer to play here than in your replacement-level rec centre. I don't think that'd be an uncommon preference. My own preferences within brutalism lie mainly with the more tropical variations, especially in Brazil with de Rocha, but generally think brutalism needs clever use of either foliage or light to succeed, ideally both.
I wrote praise for Eisenman's berlin holocaust memorial below, but beyond that, I'd hardly consider myself a fan of his more generally. My preferences for American architecture of that period lie much more with Lautner.
I primarily understand harmony and disharmony in terms of cleaving to notions of geometric proportionality, e.g. as formalised by Palladio. You could probably extend that to congruity in style and materials, both internally and in context. Personally, I can see deviations from this as well-executed or ill-considered, but it'd be an exceptional case I'd consider to be psychically harmful.
In the second case, he's saying he wouldn't like it if the entirety of his aesthetic experience was like Mantovani, who he regards as popular, but a bit vapid, saccharine, and unchallenging. I'd agree that some buildings, such as his Berlin memorial, succeed by being more challenging and this is appropriate for it's purpose. Conversely, most people wouldn't style their own house en brut, but it still appeals to some people.
But here you're softening the original statement to make it sound plausible. If he really wanted to "maximize the amount of discomfort and pain" his buildings have an unambitious amount of rusty syringes and razored door handles.
Perhaps my literacy level is not as high as yours, so you will need to help me as exactly where you see a desire to "maximize the amount of discomfort and pain" or "harm your mind", or a claim that "buildings must literally impose psychic harm and pain on the people who view and use the building".
Eisenman is also a bit of an odd figure to play the part of the socialist hell-bent on the cultural destruction of the west, I doubt he has much sympathy for anything approaching the doctrinaire socialist reorganisation of the economy. He's also a bit too in love with the work of Speer and the italian fascists (see his book on Terragni). In this interview, he largely claims his personal political affinities run conservative and notes his American projects were mostly funded from the right. This also includes this very funny aside:
(The interview is briefly interrupted as Prof. Eisenman takes a phone call from a member of the conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei who wants to know if he would mind being nominated for an architectural prize of theirs in connection with his cultural center in Santiago de Campostela in Spain. He does not, and the interview resumes.)
To the extent I've had much impression of his public persona it has been one that is a bit self-obsessed and if aesthetically radical at one point in time, never really had a broader political project and had since settled back into cantankerousness. The other thing I remember from him recently is him comparing Trump's buildings to Stalin's architecture.
It seems to me that it is far from uncommon for people to be 'high-decouplers' regarding the linguistic/semiotic/philosophical/epistemological observations of the postmodernists and deconstrutionists like Foucault and Derrida, and their political and economic positions. Another classic example: the IDF's use of D&G
sansampersamp
2mo ago
sansampersamp
2mo ago
I don't particularly care for noise music or black metal, as its a bit abrasive to my ear, but it'd be something of a epistemological leap to assert that no one genuinely enjoys it. Perhaps there is or is not some socialist uberman that exists in perfect equanimity with the entire sonic universe made and unmade, but I don't think the observation that some people listen to Merzbow is somehow contingent on it.
To the extent that I can glean a point from this, he seems to still be advocating for buildings that are in some way ugly or broken so that people notice them so that they don't merely "fade into the background."
Not really. OOO recognises that buildings-as-real-objects fade into the background in a Heideggerian sense when they become tools, i.e. the salience of their qualities is flattened to that which is relational (to the observer and the observer's use, to its constituent parts, and to the larger systems in which itself is a part). OOO questions whether it continues to be valuable for the practice of architecture to load potential buildings under a multiplicity of these relations (to zoning, environmental impact, situation within the street, ad infinitum), such that the reality of the building is obscured rather than elucidated. A building is not a 'machine for living' per corbu, it simply is in a way that is necessarily independent of the observer. The reality of the building is simply too dense to be fully described and taxonomised. Architects should become more comfortable with the vibes and ineffables, and the limited accessibility to underlying reality of objects. An invisible tool, per Harman, is a tool whose myriad qualities other than its specific utility--including and especially its aesthetic qualities--have receded from cognisance.
I have some sympathy for it, first because my time in architecture school was mostly spent within (more egological) phenomenological explorations. Second, because I think we're completely oversaturated with psychofauna in general in today's age (I recently became a parent, and it is here where this saturation is perhaps the worst of all). However, I don't much care for Harman's weird realism as a very practicable defense, and I think OOO has some unresolved boundary issues in its attempts to consider objects as real gestalten independent of their constituent parts.
What IQ would be necessary to understand the statement 'I am an architect. I build buildings that harm your mind.'?
I don't think someone would need a particularly high reading grade level to understand that statement, is this what one would expect someone with low reading grade would take way from Eisenman? Eisenman is saying that comfort and harmony do not constitute the totality of either aesthetic preference or human experience, and just like someone might listen to metal or prefer picasso to kinkade, buildings may accomodate and respond to a broader spectrum of experience. Eisenman's most famous work is the holocaust memorial in Berlin, and it's a good example of both a deconstructive minimalism (removal of ornament and complex form for simple geometry), and pursuit of typically discomfiting vibes: instability, envelopment, angularity. Stripping away detail raises the salience of other aspects of the way the memorial is experienced, e.g. the way the acoustics narrow and quiet, and how temperatures drop as you descend, and how your descent has no clean demarcation between inside and outside, over and under. How the relation to other visitors shifts from the communal ("I am one of visible dozens visiting the memorial") to the incidental ("I bumped into a specific other visitor, who then turned the other way and is again out of sight"). Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial achieves a similar minimalism that is well suited to these kind of structures, which accomodate what Etlin called a 'space of absence' -- visitors can interact with what isn't there, or against what they may have expected to be there. What is appropriate for recognition of tragedy is not necessarily what is appropriate for the home, but our lives have tragedy in them and one of the most difficult and essential functions of art is to articulate and reconcile us to that tragedy.
The first result I see for your 'brutalist high school' search is this Nikken Sekkei project. My own high school's gymnasium was a massive concrete aggregate structure repurposed from a 1917 abattoir, so I am open to arguments my aesthetic baseline is not standard here, but I'd expect kids to mostly regard the scarred-meteor interior there as incredibly cool.
Philosophical perspectives in architecture have also largely moved on from Eisenman's deconstructive minimalism in the (an) opposite direction somewhat towards Heidegger's object-relational ontology/phenomenology via Harman. See Mark Foster Gage's Killing Simplicity.
sansampersamp
2mo ago
Somewhat symmetrically, does the WSJ follow-up with woman where she states the cat returned alive and well after this report was made change your view?
sansampersamp
2mo ago
It has been fairly devastating. I grew up camping around Australia's top end, across the Litchfield tabletop plateau and Kakadu escarpment and floodplains. True frontier country. Before the cane toads made their way up from Queensland, we often saw quolls poking around the firelight edge. When the cane toads first arrived, they were scarily thick on the ground, you couldn't go for a piss in the night without seeing four of them (and this is in remote, wild areas -- not constrained to places with human activity). You see fewer cane toads now, since the monitors, kites and wedgies learned to flip them over and eat them safely, but I never saw a quoll again.
sansampersamp
3mo ago
That's an odd reading of yud there. Rats pull heavily from game theory and a (perhaps the) prototypical game theory question is how to avoid losing the prisoner's dilemma. Continually hitting the defect button is losing. You are flushing utils down the toilet. If a rationalist should win here, they should find ways to obtain credible pre-commitments and not ferret around for a way to get one over down the line.
sansampersamp
3mo ago
seeing voting as a general public duty of all citizens also helps sidestep some of the cynical and destructive framing that the ideal voting system is one that permits votes from those sympathetic to you and prevents votes from those who are not
besides simple access, voting day holidays also help enshrine the importance of the vote and strengthen the sense of community beyond politics. Also on a more pragmatic level it solves the polling location issue because you can use public schools
sansampersamp
3mo ago
first bloody them and then offer them generous peace and allow them to save face or beat them up really badly and punish them with harsh punitive peace
..
the worst of the two approaches - punitive peace with no real enforcement mechanism
You're correct that 'peace without victory' was an utterly unworkable ambition, but compounding this sin the US then largely acted to undermine attempts to enforce German debts at the same time it called in the debts owed to the US by its allies. Part of this was buying too much into Keynes' doomsaying book, and part was early cold war posturing and power balancing, but at the end of the day Versailles was hardly excessive or vindictive and it was eminently reasonable that France should seek reparations having borne all the destruction while the war's loser got off comparatively lightly. It was modest compared to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk Germany had enforced on Russia the year prior (german gains in land and population here far outstripped what they lost in Versailles) , and should be seen partly in reaction to the 3B franc indemnity imposed by Germany on France in 1871. Per Stephen Shuker, it's likely Germany ended up paying no net reparations at all, having paid its immediate bills with American loans that were subsequently defaulted on in the Great Recession. Contra Keynes, who believed that Germany could not afford the ~2B marks per year for 30 years, Mantoux estimated German rearmament spending as exceeding that seven times over for each each year between 1933 and 1939.
Sally Marks' Myths of Reparations identifies two main failures in the allied prosecution of Versailles. The first was enforcement as you mention, but the second was the failure to make it clear to the German people (who again, had lost a colossal war escaping most of the destruction) the psychological reality of their defeat: “An Allied march down the Unter den Linden would have humiliated Germany briefly, but in retrospect that might have been a small price to pay”.
sansampersamp
3mo ago
The low probability of your vote being decisive is obviously balanced by the enormous (world-historical) impact in the case that your vote is decisive. Besides, you aren't the only player of this game, and a party losing an election by 20 points has obvious implications for that party's assessment of it's positioning and strategy in the next election, that a loss by 2 points does not, even if the electoral outcome is nominally the same.
sansampersamp
3mo ago
I believe voting is a duty and I'm happy it is compulsory in Australia. The simplest argument is that:
- The legitimacy of the government is a public good, from which other public goods (safety, unity, prosperity) flow
- Democratically elected governments are legitimated through democratic participation and definite mandates across actual majorities in the population
- You have a general duty to further the public good in scenarios where one can do so at little cost to oneself
- You have a duty to vote
Broader majorities are also better for political operation and discourse. The unactivated voter is less interested in ideological marginalia and more interested in simple material concerns: jobs, crime, schools, security in retirement and so on. Political messaging in high turnout environments must convince the median citizen that his interests are best served by voting in one way or another. A politics of low turnouts is a politics where messaging seeks not to convince the unaligned, but to drive turnout among those nominally on your side already, which means escalating the perceived stakes beyond reason, deference to single-issue groups with GOTV infra, ballooning campaign budgets, and the time spent fundraising to feed them.
sansampersamp
3mo ago
Solar panels and battery with an islandable inverter that you can physically disconnect from the grid. EMP shielding won't do much if your electrical assets are on the wrong end of 100MV of induced transmission wire.
Ah, ty
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