Highlight of the week

Long days at work, running against time to make the best of insane deadlines, ratcheting up the ciggies in the process: forgotten after back-to-back season finale episodes of BATTLESTAR GALLACTICA.

I was on board for this one from the start: I loved Lee Adama's heartfelt speech at Baltar's trial, particularly after he spent most of this season mooning and pouting and just generally acting like a petulant baby, loved the creepy music and the fact that Anders, Chief Tyrol, Tigh and Tory (Roslin's press secretary) were the only ones who could hear it, loved the growing suspicion that they were all Cylons (Who better to be a Cylon, than Tigh?), loved the power outages and the mounting suspense... Yes, this was a finale that anyone could get behind.

Maybe it was a stretch to make so many longstanding characters Cylons, but maybe they just think that they're Cylons. Who knows? Most importantly, it all felt momentous, big changes were clearly afoot, changes that didn't involve any temples or empty stand-offs with the Cylons or adulterous affairs. Last night's finale had me by the throat.

Oh yeah, and Starbuck's still alive. I almost forgot.

oh suck it up... sourpuss!

MTV sues YouTube. Whatever happened to that world where love was supposed to be free?

And, can we seek punitive damages for Viacom insinuating we are all free-loading penny pinchers?

weekly dosage of anti-PC advice

Another joins the club... the latest online 'Aunt Agony', the Colbertish/Gollumesque 'Unethicist'.
[Sméagol:] Gollum hates thieves!

Go G. I. Joes!!

In a deeply disturbing news,
The biggest, most shiny, most chrome covered, most yellow, most 'wide and ugly' Hummer is "going green". And nothing says "I am less of a man" than going green and smelling like spring flowers. On a totally different note, here are some nice pictures from a hummer fan site.

Learning [of] more left me sore...

A recent trip to Las Vegas left me overwhelmed, exhausted and a tad bit irritated. What the hell did Venturi mean, legitimizing tackiness through clever tags (less is a bore)? Over 30 years ago, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and the late Steven Izenour wrote Learning from Las Vegas, a case study that attempted to open the world's eyes to vernacular architecture and iconography-the "ugly and ordinary" structures and signage born to satisfy the needs of regular people, not architects. Having re-read it upon my return from the sensation overload, I realise that what the book was commenting upon was the irony that Americans hate signs; that they are enormously afraid of being vulgar because of their signs in their cities, and of being thereby materialistic, commercial, and all that. It is this commercial signage that the book sought to celebrate, within the framework of 'place' and the 'city'.

Today, the Las Vegas they wrote about no longer exists despite its ugliness. The buildings and the signs they studied have merged. The former Strip is now officially "the Boulevard." And the city is less iconographic, and more merely scenic -in a sense Las Vegas is now City as Scenography; it's a Disneyland. Most cities are to some extent scenographic, but few are as explicitly theatrical. It doesn't hit our funny bone, our crazy bone anymore - it has become sentimental. Everything reminds you of someplace one was lucky enough to travel to - only a cheaper version of it. If the ordinary itself succumbs to its insecurity at being ordinary, what is the point in glorifying it?

Incredibly, there is a return - somewhat. A moment where faux is legitimized. The Guggenheim Las Vegas begins where the opulence ends. The Venetian Resort's gilt moldings, faux marble columns and scroll patterned carpet come to a dead end at the unmistakable sign of contemporary art -- steel. An array of steel doors is surmounted by the name of the new museum spelled out in metal letters attached to the entrance ceiling. All very industrial, cool and utterly foreign to the average casino junkie, despite architect Rem Koolhaas' assurance that "it is all part of the same thing, including the casino." The Dutch architect is known to be interested in the urban context of his buildings and as one of many of his admirers I was curious to see what he would come up with for a museum cut out of the side of one of Las Vegas' most spectacular fantasies, a hotel that has recreated what it calls "San Marco Square," along with canals with live gondoliers offering rides under an ersatz Bridge of Sighs. The Guggenheim Hermitage Museum is what he calls the "jewelbox" (in contrast to the "big box") and appropriately enough, it opened with jewels from the collections of its namesake in St. Petersburg and from the Guggenheim collection in New York. From the outside, this is signage as architecture. A wall of brown Cor-ten steel cuts along the front of the Venetian's faux terracotta surface, giant letters proclaiming "Guggenheim Hermitage." Inside the lobby, within 7,660 square feet, Koolhaas designed a museum both luxurious and modern. The interior walls are also made of CorTen steel but appear to be as soft as sienna velvet. They are suspended several inches from the floor, so that light seeps in from below, lending a flavor of airy Japonisme to the space, enhanced by the angled ceiling of blond wood. Narrow slot windows allow a diffused light to enter. How skillful and restrained is Koolhaas' comprehension of space, proportion and surface! Speaking of surface, the masterpieces are attached to the walls with giant magnets, a fact as ingenious as it is quirky.

The museum was empty when I visited - lack of funds in a city which literally throws its moneys around. A mind-boggling 35 million tourists visit Las Vegas each year. If a fraction is willing to spend $15 for a ticket, the Gugg and the Hermitage may be able to pay rent to the casino for their spaces.

whatever it takes...

Recent trends to conserve IT [Indian Tradition]'s culture of love:

• warning shop keepers not to sell cards and gifts in the name of Valentine Day.
• [failing which] Encourage the burning of Valentine Day cards.
• Taboo the word Valentine.
• Present - um, insist on - the option of celebrating lover's day in the name of current heartthrobs actors, Abhishek-Aishwarya rather than resort to a foreign name of St. Valentine to express love [I did not make this up!]
• Erect billboard advertisements asking young lovers not to hold hands
• [my personal favourite] photograph couples caught expressing their love in cinemas, cafes and shopping malls and hand the pictures to their parents.

read all about the practices in resistence at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6358531.stm

just a news

those kooky kids...

brain train

turns out that the path to smarts doesn't include gluttenous consumption of information, after all. au contraire, a fat brain and an old brain is a dumb brain. one and all...here come the new-row-scientists.

Annual Blindness

...I wonder how much of this was last year's article, with a few names changed? As the movie awards season commences, so do the speculations on that ever eluding boundary of foreignness. We are reminded annually of our blindness, while the world watches (or so we are told). I can't wait to see if ever a day will come when we are left to our blindness.

Life In Mono

logo a go go

Using Flickr as jurying process, Architecture for Humanity has opened up the selection of its logo to the public. In less than 12 days AFH received 812 entries from more than 60 countries, an incredible response from the design community. Hats off to ALL who entered. During December more than 65 jurors from four continents voted both online (via Flickr commenting) and offline. AFH are now in the process of selecting the winner from the list of finalists. This week AFH made the Flickr sets open to the public to make their own comments - already it has been viewed over 1500 times. So click on the Final Round link and decide on who you think should win!

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lovers, Haters, Murderers, Barbarians ...

...lend me your eyes. Even though the HBO series never quite rose, and eventually fell with an inconsequential thud, I was happy to read about its revival recently. Indeed, every works of the imagination on Rome reveals more about the epochs that produced them than they do about the vanished civilization they depict - much like all representations, I suppose. This one, I remember as having enthralled me by its , ummm, earnestly accumulated squalor and grit, as if saying: We must say ta-ta to empires now and introduce ourselves to civilizations. I don't know if they quite did that, but that squalor was sure requisitely pretty.

sold! to the devil.

to bite, or not to bite - that is the question....
Even for an ardent macFan, this latest gizmo begs the question: at what price did Steve Jobs sell himself to the devil? The signs are everywhere!
(to the left: the LG Chocolate, to the right: the new i-phone. ohhh, the suspense is killing me...will i or won't i be $499 poorer?)

you are toast...

I love the absurdity of this site and the fact that 100% of the proceeds (and they appear to be significant) will go to charity. Not sure where these crazy cats are from, but judging from their use of the word "brilliant", I am guessing the UK. It's too hard to explain, just click through and check it out for yourself. And... buy some toast... www.yournameontoast.com

oh, the burden of fun...

Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children then jumped into the water...


Initially I felt some cold, but one dip and the cold was gone.

sshhhh...

an awwww... moment

two Bengali Economists & Nobel Laureates meet in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Dec 25.

Left: Dr. Amartya Sen (Economics, 1998)
2nd from right: Dr. Muhammad Yunus (Peace prize, 2006)

bla time on christmas eve

dude, where's my car?!

my first blizzard, my first snow shovelling, my first falling squarely on my ass on the snow... and almost cracking my pelvis...
I think I will stay away from ice-creams for quite some time.

some wise words

And when your life is in the toilet and that blue water is swirling around your head, just remember: The sky is also blue, and as we all know, the sky’s the limit.
(It’s important to hope, but vodka does not remove bloodstains from white linen.)
- from A WORD OF ADVICE.