A Scanner Darkly: Best Scenes

My favourite esoteric scenes from the best Keanu Reeves movie, A Scanner Darkly (2006), Where finally, Keanu's wooden acting skills came to use when he played this vacant and  jaded character. Still yet to read the 1977 Phillip K. Dick book though. And most definitely not the best Linklater film, 'cause Before Sunset takes the cake. 

The Self Illusion: How the Brain Constructs Who We Are

We know that the notions of stable character and fixed personality are a myth. And yet, our culture is wired for labels and checkboxes, eager to neatly file people away into categorical cabinets and thrown into furor over the slightest inkling of multiplicity. Take, for instance, Howard Hughes, at once a legendary aviator, movie mogul, tycoon, and socialite, and a reclusive billionaire housebound by his deathly phobia of dirt. He was a fearless aviation pioneer who set and broke countless records, yet he remained terrified of dying from germs. Hughes spent his final days unbathed, dressed in rags, with long sticky hair, curling nails, and the remnants of five hypodermic needles in his arms. He was worth $2 billion. It was this biography woven of paradoxes and dimensionality that compelled cognitive neuroscientist Bruce Hood to explore the building blocks of what we experience as the “self” in The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity. Adding to the ongoing conversation on what consciousness is, how it works, and how it measures up against Truth, Hood writes:

"Each morning, we wake up and experience a rich explosion of consciousness — the bright morning sunlight, the smell of roast coffee and, for some of us, the warmth of the person lying next to us in bed. As the slumber recedes into the night, we awake to become who we are. The morning haze of dreams and oblivion disperses and lifts as recognition and recall bubble up the content of our memories into our consciousness. For the briefest of moments we are not sure who we are and then suddenly ‘I,’ the one that is awake, awakens. We gather our thoughts so that the ‘I’ who is conscious becomes the ‘me’ — the person with a past. The memories of the previous day return. The plans for the immediate future reformulate. The realization that we have things to get on with remind us that it is a workday. We become a person whom we recognize.

The call of nature tells us it is time to visit the bathroom and en route we glance at the mirror. We take a moment to reflect. We look a little older, but we are still the same person who has looked in that same mirror every day since we moved in. We see our self in that mirror. This is who we are.

The daily experience of the self is so familiar, and yet the brain science shows that this sense of the self is an illusion. Psychologist Susan Blackmore makes the point that the word ‘illusion’ does not mean that it does not exist — rather, an illusion is not what it seems. We all certainly experience some form of self, but what we experience is a powerful depiction generated by our brains for our own benefit."

Hood goes on to trace how the self emerges in childhood and examines why this notion of the illusory self is among the hardest concepts to accept, contrasting the “ego theory” of the self, which holds that we are essential entities inside bodies, with Hume’s “bundle theory,” which constructs the self not as a single unified entity but as a bundle of sensations, perceptions, and thoughts lumped together. Neuroscience, Hood argues, only supports the latter. The Self Illusion tells the story of how that bundle forms and why it sticks together, revealing the brain’s own storytelling as the centripetal force of the self.

How to Think More about Sex by Alain de Botton

“The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.”

...

“When we hook up with another, in sex or love (or, more rarely, both) we prove that our isolation is not permanent,” - Dorion Sagan 

And yet that very quest to end our isolation has been subject to centuries of stigma and incessant friction with our social values. But it needn’t be this way. We are guided through the perils this sexual conundrum by philosopher Alain de Botton.

De Botton writes in the introduction:

"Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should. Tame it though we may try, sex has a recurring tendency to wreak havoc across our lives: it leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don’t like but whose exposed midriffs we nevertheless strongly wish to touch. Sex remains in absurd, and perhaps irreconcilable, conflict with some of our highest commitments and values. Unsurprisingly, we have no option but to repress its demands most of the time. We should accept sex as inherently rather weird instead of blaming ourselves for not responding in more normal ways to its confusing impulses."

"This is not to say that we cannot take steps to grow wiser about sex. We should simply realize that we will never entirely surmount the difficulties it throws our way. Our best hope should be a respectful accommodation with an anarchic and reckless power."

He later offers a delightfully animated account, of why a kiss holds the appeal that it does:

"The pleasure of the moment can be understood only by considering its wider context: the overwhelming indifference against which any kiss is set. It goes almost without saying that the majority of people we encounter will be not merely uninterested in having sex with us but positively revolted by the idea. We have no choice but to keep a minimum of sixty or, even better, ninety centimeters’ distance between us and them at all times, to make it absolutely clear that our compromised selves have no intention of intruding into their personal spheres.

Then comes the kiss. The deeply private realm of the mouth — that dark, moist cavity that no one else but our dentist usually enters, where our tongue reigns supreme over a microcosm as silent and unknown as the belly of a whale — now prepares to open itself up to another. The tongue, which has had no expectation of ever meeting a compatriot, gingerly approaches a fellow member of its species, advancing with something of the reserve and curiosity exhibited by a South Sea Islander in greeting the arrival of the first European adventurer. Indentations and plateaus in the inner lining of the cheeks, hitherto thought of as solely personal, are revealed as having counterparts. The tongues engage each other in a tentative dance. …

Beneath the kiss itself, it is its meaning that interests us — which is why the desire to kiss someone can be decisively reduced… by a declaration of that desire — a confession which may in itself be so erotic as to render the actual kiss superfluous."

But the true mesmerism of sex, de Botton argues, isn’t even in the physical act itself — it’s in the existential promise that it holds:

"The pleasure we derive from sex is also bound up with our recognizing, and giving a distinctive seal of approval to, those ingredients of a good life whose presence we have detected in another person. The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

Our culture encourages us to acknowledge very little of who we normally are in the act of sex. It seems as if it might be a purely physical process, without any psychological importance. But … what happens in love-making is closely bound up with some of our most central ambitions. The act of sex plays out through the rubbing together of organs, but our excitement is no boorish physiological reaction; rather, it is an ecstasy we feel at encountering someone who may be able to put to rest certain of our greatest fears, and with whom we may hope to build a shared life based upon common values."

Ultimately, sex is a grounding mechanism that reminds us of our own imperfect humanity, and in that imperfection lies the messy richness of being human:

"Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately. We could age respectably, get used to our privileges and think we understood what was going on. We might disappear into numbers and words alone. It is sex that creates a necessary havoc in the ordinary hierarchies of power, status, money and intelligence.

[…]

We might even embrace the pain sex causes us, for without it we wouldn’t know art and music quite so well. … When every contemptuous but fair thing has been said about our infernal sexual desires, we can still celebrate them for not allowing us to forget for more than a few days at a time what is really involved in living an embodied, chemical and largely insane human life."

The English Patient...

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. 

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.” 

100 Ideas that Changed Photography

British publisher Laurence King formerly brought us 100 Ideas That Changed Architecture. Now comes 100 Ideas That Changed Photography— an equally concise and intelligent chronicle of the most seminal developments in the history of today’s most prevalent visual art, with each of the ideas is accompanied by a short essay contextualizing its history and significance.

"Before it materialized as the camera and lens, photography was an idea. The desire to make a special kind of representation, originating in the object itself, is as old as humankind. It appears in the stencil paintings of hands in prehistoric art. In Western culture, the legend of the Corinthian woman who traced the shadow of her lover on a wall before he departed for war has evolved into an origin story for figurative art and, in the 1840s, for photography. Soon after the medium was disclosed to the world in 1839, the word ‘facsimile’ was adapted to describe the photograph’s unprecedented authenticity. Samuel F. B. Morse observed that a photograph could not be called a copy, but was a portion of nature itself. That notion, which persisted throughout the nineteenth century, found new life in the late twentieth-century language theory, in which the photograph was characterized as an imprint or transfer of the real, like a fingerprint."

 IDEA # 1: THE CAMERA OBSCURA

When Christian Gobrecht illustrated the workings of a camera obscura for Abraham Rees’s The Cyclopedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature (1805-22), he was careful to show how the device created an inverted image.

IDEA # 4: NEGATIVE/POSITIVE

The negative formed the basis of photography until the digital age. It is based on the reversal of dark and light tone.

 IDEA # 2: THE LATENT IMAGE

The latent image was coaxed from the daguerreotype plate by being exposed to mercury fumes in a so-called 'bath' like this one.

  IDEA # 9: THE LENS

Specially designed weights or impromptu inventions were attached to the shutter to create timed lens exposures.

IDEA # 12: CYANOTYPE

The cyanotype allowed builders and engineers to create durable and detailed drawings.

 IDEA # 12: CYANOTYPE

Anna Atkins was one of the first scientists to use the cyanotype to record delicate specimens, as in Himanthalia lorea, from her 1843 book on algae.

 IDEA # 13: COLLODION

Photographers who used the collodion process had to process their glass plates before and after exposure. They brought a portable darkroom and sometimes employed assistants to help.

 IDEA # 27: CARTES DE VISITE

Disdéri’s multiple portraits of a ballet dancer is entitled Petipa (c. 1862), for the renowned French dance master and choreographer. Performers and public figures often had cartes de visite made in great numbers, which they either gave away or sold.

 IDEA # 46: PROJECTION

In 1925, the French children’s magazine Le Petit Inventeur captured the wonder of projected images.

IDEA # 56: THE PEOPLE'S ART

For the cover of a 1929 issue of the German publication The Worker Photographer, Ernst Thormann chose a close-up of a Roma child.

 IDEA # 56: THE PEOPLE'S ART

In this anonymous early Kodak snapshot from about 1888, the maker’s shadow is clearly visible on the lower left side.

IDEA # 77: THE SELF-PORTRAIT

In her 1896 Self-Portrait (as New Woman) successful Washington, D.C. photographer and business owner, Frances Benjamin Johnston, poses cross-legged, as a man might do, while holding a cigarette and a beer stein.

100 Ideas that Changed Architecture

“Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use,” - Frank Lloyd Wright

The convergence of practicality and beauty is perhaps the central defining characteristic of architecture itself, and of every meaningful development that has pushed the discipline forward over the millennia. In 100 Ideas that Changed Architecture, Cardiff University architecture professor Richard Weston and British publisher Laurence King — trace the most influential cornerstones of architectural ideology and practice.

Weston writes in the Introduction:

"Surprisingly few of the ideas are philosophical or theoretical in character; indeed, some readers may wonder whether some of them — like Fireplace with which the book begins, and Wall and Brick which quickly follow — are ideas at all….

‘Ideas’ that really change the practical art of architecture are not just the relatively few grand philosophical bodies of thought that shape civilizations, but frequently altogether more humble ideas like a brick or reinforcing concrete with rods of steel. Everything that humans make begins, ultimately, with an idea: not, perhaps, those we think of as patentable — the kind cartoonists like to represent as a bulb flashing in a scientist’s head — but as a guiding concept that, for example, tells a stonemason how to shape and place stone on stone to create an arch which, as if by magic, makes it possible to defy gravity and make an opening in a wall. Many such ideas must have occurred independently to different people in different places and the moment when the metaphorical bulb first flashed will never be known — but this does not diminish their importance."

 Idea # 4: COLUMN AND BEAM

Steel frames, consisting of vast networks of columns and beams, have been the preferred structure for tall buildings in the U.S. since the late nineteenth century.

 Idea # 5: DOOR

'Places made for an occasion,' from Gaudi’s Casa Milà in Barcelona and Michel de Klerk’s housing in Amsterdam to medieval doors in San Gimignano, the design of openings and doors offers rich, expressive possibilities.

Idea # 11: VAULT

Right: Lincoln Cathedral is celebrated for its experimental vaults, such as that seen here in St. Hugh’s Choir –known as the “Crazy Vault” on account of its eccentric, asymmetrical version of the classic six-part tierceron vault developed in France.

Idea # 15: ATRIUM

Right: Glass-covered atria—seen here on the grand scale at Rafael Viñoly’s Tokyo International Forum—offer numerous environmental and energy-saving advantages and have become common in offices, hotels, and many other buildings since the 1980s.

Idea # 19: PROPORTION

Top left: Le Corbusier’s lifelong fascination with proportion as a key to architectural beauty culminated in the development of a proportioning system based on the so-called Golden Raio, published in his book Le Modulor in 1948.

Idea # 22: IDEAL

In plan and section, Classical designs such as Sir Christopher Wren’s for St. Paul’s Cathedral, were controlled by 'ideal' geometric forms such as circles and squares that were thought to bring visual harmony to the composition.

Idea # 25: SYMMETRY

Left: As well as sharing the use of axial symmetry in their spatial organization, the decoration of Islamic buildings abounds in complex forms of symmetry rarely encountered in Western architecture.

 Idea # 28: ARCHITECT

Left: More than any of his contemporaries, Le Corbusier—seen here with his ever-present black-rimmed glasses—helped to define the modern image of the architect as an inspired artist-designer.

 Idea # 30: PERSPECTIVE PROJECTION

Right: This beautiful watercolor rendering of the project for Otto Wagner’s own house in Vienna was published in 1890 in the first of a four-part edition of his work. As can be seen from the construction lines on the plan, the center of projection for the perspective lies just off the street.

 Idea # 35: CORRIDOR

Ubiquitous in complex institutional buildings such as many offices, schools, and hospitals, the corridor is a surprisingly recent invention, dating back only to the eighteenth century.

 Idea # 49: THE ELEVATOR

Top right: The 1930s offered no more compelling illustration of the intensity of development made possible by the elevator than the New York skyline; the 102-story Empire State Building, seen in the distance, remained the world’s tallest until the 1970s.

 Idea # 63: ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE

Right: The Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava frequently claims inspiration from nature, as seen here in the Quadracci Pavilion, a major addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum completed in 2001. The fully glazed reception hall is surmounted by an adjustable, winglike sunscreen (above) while the galleria (right) is said to have been inspired by a wave, and to resemble the bleached bones of a shark.

 Idea # 70: AXONOMETRIC PROJECTION

Right: Theo van Doesburg, the founder of the Dutch De Stijl movement, employed abstract colored planes and axonometric projection to evoke his vision of an ideal spiritual world, floating free of gravity.

 Idea # 78: MORPHOLOGY

Right: During the 1950s the Finnish architect Reima Pietilä (1923-93) undertook an imaginative series of morphological studies of natural phenomena: supremely elegant, the resulting drawings and models exerted a decisive influence on his later architectural work.

Idea # 97: BIGNESS

In 1994, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, founder and principal of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), wrote that 'In a landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation, disclamation, the attraction of Bigness is its potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility.'

Anaïs Nin: Emotional Excess is Essential to Creativity

Excerpt from the Diary of Anaïs Nin:

"I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.

[…]

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith."

Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography

Balthazar Korab passed away at the age of 86 in Troy, MI earlier this year. He was a loyalist, in the documenting process as well as producing a perfectly polished result. The cover of the book shows an image of Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal (1962), perhaps the era's most photogenic building. The image shows a moment of repose, a traveler in the background with hip cocked against a counter. The foreground is filled with one of Saarinen's exquisite tiled curves, accentuated by a gradient of light and shadow. In places you can hardly see the lighted tile, in others they fade into shadow. But one is well aware of the physicality of that curve, and the way it was made. The edge is not sharp but looks nibbled by thousands of regular teeth. Korab was born in Hungary, a refugee during the Second World War who finally escaped the Soviet occupation of Budapest in 1949. After crossing the Austrian border, he found a job on an American military base in Glasenbach as a U.S. Army photographer. Eventually he made his way west to Paris, where he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and was absorbed into the wider community of architects and Hungarian emigres. In 1953 Korab met Sally Dow, an American in Paris studying piano; a year later they were married, and Dow took him home to meet her family in Michigan. Restless, Korab soon realized that Eero Saarinen's office was in a nearby suburb, and applied for a job. Korab worked for Saarinen as an architect for three years, from 1955 to 1958, and on projects that included IBM Rochester (1958), the Miller House (1957) and the U.S. Chancellery in London (1960). When he left the office, he decided to set up an independent photography practice. He continued to work for Saarinen as a photographer, and was taken up by the network of architects who had worked in the office, as well as other Detroit practices like those of Minoru Yamasaki and William Kessler. (This biography is sourced and condensed from Comazzi's book.). Some of the most intriguing images in the Korab book are the work of the Detroit diaspora. I had never before seen Yamasaki's Great Lakes Regional Headquarters of the Reynolds Metals Company (1959), for example. A pavilion-like building set on a podium within an orthogonal pond, Korab's two images show the affinity between Yamasaki's delicate suspended screen of circles and the lilypads in the water below. In a shot of the triangle-patterned front door of Yamasaki's McGregor Memorial Conference Center at Wayne State (1958), the picture is as much about the bare trees beyond the bony steel structure as it is about the architect's ornamental front doors, a screen of metal triangles. Again and again, Korab adds texture to the modernist monuments by not editing nature out. On the opposite page from Wayne State is a shot of Mies ven der Rohe's Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951) in the snow. His quote: "It was a wet, snowy day, the there were these beautiful tailfins of a Cadillac in the foreground, with the parking meter ... it all acts as a counterpoint to the regularity of Mies's architecture." In another picture, Toronto Dominion Center fades into the mist. (Dwell has an excellent slideshow with additional images here.) Korab took photographs throughout the process of building TWA, a number of which are reproduced in the book. One can speculate about the cover image: would he have highlighted that curve, and its cloak of tile, had he not been there as they modeled, shaped, and smoothed the concrete? A project portfolio by Korab in the January 1958 issue of Architectural Forum introduced the bird in flight to the architectural public. For me, it is another Korab image of a Saarinen building that shows his deep understanding of the work. It is of the Deere & Co. Headquarters (1964), shot across the slope into which the display pavilion is cut. Instead of seeing the tractors inside, you see the wavy reflection of the grass and the trees behind, the Cor-Ten columns starting to blur and blend into the real trunks. Long before Saarinen could be revived and reinterpreted, Korab was interpeting, seeing Saarinen's intention and shooting it. 

Sasha Grey: Neü Sex

Neü Sex is Sasha Grey's foray into documenting the porn industry.  Made in collaboration with VICE and published by powerHouse, Neü Sex features intimate imagery that provides us with a look into Grey's private life. Sasha's boyfriend and professional photographer Ian Cinnamon also contributed to the book, photographing Sasha when she was physically unable to do it herself (for whatever reason…). Above all things, Neü Sex is anything but boring, and intriguing at the very least. 

Here's Sasha talking about her creative detour that took her to develop Neü Sex