April 2009
8 posts
Genocide in Sri Lanka
From what I understand from the Tamils in my local shop who are in touch with people in the North of the island there are literally hundreds of people being killed every day in the North of Sri Lanka and no-one is really reporting it. Very much like Rwanda and Indonesia, this seems to be a quiet mass killing, the Tamils being smothered to death in the North of the island. This makes me very angry....
John Ruskin
I picked up a collection of John Ruskin’s writings whilst in the Lake District over Easter. His writing on the nature of the Gothic is one of the best close semiotic analyses of architecture I have ever read. Ruskin breaks the style into its constituent parts including the Grotesque, the Savage, Changefulness etc etc. He reads these into the features of the architecture itself such as ribbed...
Baroque at the V&A
I thought the Baroque exhibition at the V&A was a little disappointing. Unlike previous design shows such as Art Deco, curated by my mate Ghislaine Wood, it lacked a certain flair but also felt superficial. What I want to get from these shows is a sense of how the ideologies and social values of an age affected the material signifiers. There was no mention of the religious background to...
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”
– Antonio Gramsci
