June 20, 2010
–Simon Wiesenthal (1908 – 2005), architect, survivor of death camps across Europe, documenter of Nazi war crimes, and intrepid and dedicated hunter of war criminals.
February 15, 2010
Here is Leonardo Da Vinci’s letter to the Duke of Milan, advertising all of his skills and services, good for times of both war and peace. Talk about creative destruction of the city. An interesting CV for the painter of the Mona Lisa.
If your medieval Latin isn’t great, click below for the translations:
December 21, 2009
In dreams, affects take shape and form and color. affects are drawn into resonance, the seemingly disparate in waking life are crashed or woven together into intricate, shocking, garish, intimate realness.
A key character in dreams, or narratives of dreams, is the setting itself. In my dreams, interior and exteriors blend, neighborhoods in different cities open up to each other, like the impossible geographies of Kafka’s stories.
Yesterday the New York Times published an Iraq war veteran’s dreams and reflections. Here are some important excerpts:
What if it’s not a dream at all? What if I really have the city of Mosul inside of me? Or at least that neighborhood on a sunny morning. Maybe when I go to sleep I’m actually entering a world in which Iraqi mothers search through the landscape of my memory in the vain hope of finding their dead sons. My body a sort of graveyard, a repository of the lost and the dead.
January 20, 2009
Martin Luther King could never be president. Not because of racist attitudes of America in the 1960s (those haven’t changed all that much), but because he was an enemy of the state, not its benign friend– not a smiling visage on a t-shirt, or a McDonald’s advertisement. We ought to be careful to whom we compare this man, who never hesitated to call out the injustice at the heart of American existence. (more…)
January 20, 2009
Israeli attacks on the densely populated cities of Gaza were conveniently halted just one day before the inauguration of our new world leader. I am worried about what kind of urban politics these actions will “inaugurate.” What is being born in Gaza in the wake of this destruction? A depth of feeling we will no longer be able to contain; subjectivities we could never map.
For more about this map, and other maps of Gaza, click here.
