tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post115389006651434406..comments2023-06-30T07:19:03.441-07:00Comments on The Golden Ass: Email Conversation Continued: Absolute Truth and Separation of LanguagesJason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-1154320790192838922006-07-30T21:39:00.000-07:002006-07-30T21:39:00.000-07:00Eisenman is a nasty piece of work. Had him on seve...Eisenman is a nasty piece of work. Had him on several crits in school and he's just plain mean. Stern is a charmer and you should hear him do a fundraising stand-up in front of a crowd of Yalies. Gets the money flying out of their pockets. Not a bad guy at all: a warm-hearted operator. Charlie was (died in the 80's, alas) an absent-minded Santa Claus. One of my favorite quotes, recently recalled by a fellow student: somebody in the class had made a model of some building, and one of the teachers looked at it and said "Cute", and Charlie said "If I were 1/16th scale I'd be cute too."<BR/><BR/>Take a look at the pyramid bed from his house in Essex, Connecticut if you can find a picture of it.Tomhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07575451333006756797noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-1154307563915828172006-07-30T17:59:00.000-07:002006-07-30T17:59:00.000-07:00Also, Tom,You probably aren't as embarrased as I w...Also, Tom,<BR/><BR/>You probably aren't as embarrased as I was yesterday when I asked out this hot woman in public and was DENIED!<BR/><BR/>Also, I realized, my blog, "A Personal Story, from Dark to Light", I think you would like it. But I think you may not have seen it because it's burried there underneath so much intellectual babble :)Jason Hesiakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-1154305199768186982006-07-30T17:19:00.000-07:002006-07-30T17:19:00.000-07:00Embarrassed? Baahh humbug! Boohh to that! No em...Embarrassed? Baahh humbug! Boohh to that! No embarrassment allowed! Acceptance and love only, thank you :)<BR/><BR/>Stern...yeah. Now that you mention the elitist thing, honestly, part of why I don't like the guy is because he just seems like an ass hole to me...uuuhh, is that allowed? <BR/><BR/>As for Moore, I was exposed to him in college a bit, and didn't pursue it further because I saw certain things in his work that made it impossible for me to appreciate enough to persue it further. I just looked him up, and, yeah, playful and uplifting seem good discriptions. It looks too like, from what I saw, they don't just seek to "reference" a closed and objectified signifier in the misty and forgotten haze of the past, but that his work actually has a depth of times overlayed and transformed into the now. The colors have an intensity and brightness where Eisernman's have an annoying neutrality and chalkiness.Jason Hesiakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-1154303997913851732006-07-30T16:59:00.000-07:002006-07-30T16:59:00.000-07:00Thank you very much for the deeper derivation of p...Thank you very much for the deeper derivation of post-modern. I stand not just corrected but embarrassed at the unfounded confidence of my post.<BR/><BR/>Totally with you on Stern. A designer of buildings as attractive and hollow as magazine advertisements. Which isn't to say that some of them--the library at St. Paul's school--aren't very attractive indeed. Still, St. Paul's is itself a temple of elitism like no other.<BR/><BR/>But Charlie Moore--now that's another story. An architect who loved people, loved to glorify the simple act of entering a room, loved history and the overlaying of one culture on top of another. His buildings are playful, uplifting, grand when they need to be and fun when they want to be. His houses are miracles of discovery and not models to pose on the covers of glossy magazines.Tomhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07575451333006756797noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-1154293626249247462006-07-30T14:07:00.000-07:002006-07-30T14:07:00.000-07:00Tom,I was finding myself too curious about the ori...Tom,<BR/>I was finding myself too curious about the origin of the term postmdodern, and finally came across the story of it recently. Come to find out, the early/mid seventies was the time not when it originated, but when it was popularized.<BR/><BR/>"...there are anticipations of and precursors to ideas and terminology which gain currency at a later date. For example, and English painter, John Watkins Chapman, spoke of 'postmodern painting' around 1870 to designate painting that was allegedly more modern and avant-garde than French impressionist painting...the term appeared in 1917 in a book...to describe the nihilism and collaps of values in contemporary European culture...<BR/><BR/>After WWII, the notion of a 'postmodern' break with the modern age appeared in a one-volume summation by D.C. Somervell of the first six volumes of British historian Arnold Toynbee's A STUDY OF HISTORY (1947)...Somervell and Toynbee suggested the concept of the 'post-Modern age'. This period constituted a dramatic mutation and rupture from the previous modern age and was characterized by wars, social turmoil and revolution..." (POSTMODERN THEORY, p. 5-6, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner).<BR/><BR/>The same book goes on to describe a usage of the term in 1957 by Bernard Rosenberg to describe something more like how we now think of it.<BR/><BR/>As for Stern or Moore, I like neither. It was folks like them, or even Peter Eiserman, who turned me away from postmodernity when I first began to learn about it. It was Focault and Daniel Libeskind who originally turned me onto it in some way. <BR/><BR/>What I find unhelpful about Stern is that, despite his efforts to bring us back home to actual recognizable images, ect., it still relies on an epistemology of Cartesian cognition that turns a classical iconicalism into a closed, objectified system both to view and live in the world. I can embrace icons, but not unless they are pointers to something beyond, not closed systems in themselves. This is why I like the symbolism in Libeskind's work. <BR/><BR/>It is also only Libeskind's work that is really able to resist the mass media capitalistic forces of contemporary culture in which architecture is indistinguishable from real-estate. Stern's epistemology plays right into the real-estate market.<BR/><BR/>JasonJason Hesiakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-1154275873103623832006-07-30T09:11:00.000-07:002006-07-30T09:11:00.000-07:00Interestingly, the term post-Modern was coined by ...Interestingly, the term post-Modern was coined by architects in the early 70's to describe buildings--usually their own--that no longer hewed to the Mies/Corbusier/Gropius Modernist orthodoxy of glass, steel, straight edges and form-follow-function. These architects wanted to play around with pitched roofs, neo-classical themes, warmer materials and intentional quirkiness. They wanted Henry Hobson Richardson to replace Mies van der Rohe on the altar of the temple. So because they were going beyond the Modernism in which they themselves had been educated they called themselves post-Modern. The first time I ever heard the word was from either Robert A.M. Stern or Charles Moore in about 1974. <BR/><BR/>That simple. I wonder if any dictionaries of derivations know that.<BR/><BR/>As one of those architects said around that time, "The shadow of Walter Gropius has left the land." Given that that shadow had caused the destruction of Penn Station, it was a event to be celebrated.Tomhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07575451333006756797noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-1154157034549370612006-07-29T00:10:00.000-07:002006-07-29T00:10:00.000-07:00I think it has been mentioned in intellectual circ...I think it has been mentioned in intellectual circles that shit represents the "medium" that gives the message that ALL of creation is in fact Holy. I say that in the context of the mediumlessness against which the post-moderns have reacted.Jason Hesiakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-1154152962602590372006-07-28T23:02:00.000-07:002006-07-28T23:02:00.000-07:00holy shit. :o)holy shit. <BR/><BR/><BR/>:o)Empty Voicehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08232222042184901838noreply@blogger.com