Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
Pyramid mausoleum
Blickling Park, Norfolk, England. Built by Joseph Bonomi in 1796–7.
The art of Eyvind Earle
Archigram
In late 1960, in various flats in Hampstead, a loose group of people started to meet: to criticize projects, to concoct letters to the press, to make competition projects, and generally prop one another up against the boredom of working in London architectural offices. The main British magazines of the time did not publish student work and Archigram was responding to this as much as to the sterility of the scene. The title Archigram came from the notion of a more simple and urgent item than a Journal, like a telegram or aerogramme – hence, “archi(tecture)-gram”.
Gore Vidal on American tolerance
Discussing Brokeback Mountain, among other things:
Look, homophobia is fed into every child in the United States at birth. It is unrelenting, it never lets up. They asked a whole raft of high school boys across the country a couple years ago, one of those polls about what they would most like to be in life, and what – they would hate to be, and so forth, and what they would most hate to be was homosexual.
There wasn’t anyone, not one, who just skipped the question. They all said “oh no, that’s the worst thing you could be.”
To get over that training, that’s generation after generation. And it has not done the character of our nation much good. And that’s why we are a joke to the rest of the world, because we carry on about sexual matters everyone else has forgotten about.
…
So will this movie change anything? I think it might give some people a little more heart that what they’re doing is not so unusual. It is traditional, it is biologically correct; mammals have been performing same-sexual acts ever since the first mammal was created. I was not present, alas, at the time, but mammals do behave like that and to say they don’t or to try to frighten them as all those schoolboys have been frightened – well that kind of indoctrination is awful, it makes us seem like a very stupid country to other people, with stupid laws. People are in prison for having done “unnatural acts” as they call it.
Continues here.