Saudades da minha gata :}

The Machine Stops

New York City is the greatest public works project in the USA. It is a city of tubes, grids, circuits and networks. We are organised by numbered floors and numbered streets and numbered apartments, fed and watered through great pipes and tunnels and bridges, shuttled to and fro in shifts along lines. On Monday night the magnificent machines were revealed to us, as they failed one by one.

American newscasters hyperventilate about everything, and foam at the mouth when the subject is weather systems over the Northeastern United States, so there seemed no special reason to pay them any urgent attention in the days leading up to Sandy. The storm only became real when the governor announced the closure of the subway system onSunday morning. The process takes eight hours. Employees moved train cars, removed tracks that might be damaged by salt water, primed pumps, cleaned drains, evacuated stations and cleared rail yards prone to flooding.

That night, the Metropolitan Transit Authority posted photos of Times Square subway station, empty. Penn Station, empty. Grand Central Station, empty, and a shot of the last train out of town. Through the ventilation grid outside my house, an automated voice recited, like a ghost: ‘There is a Brooklyn-bound… express train… two stations away.’ Then she fell silent.

Alan Weisman, the author of The World Without Us, was recently asked what would happen to New York City if ‘all humans vanished’:

Within two days, without pumping, New York’s subway would impassably flood. Within twenty years, water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side’s 4-5-6 trains would corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river. In the first few years with no heat, pipes burst all over town, the freeze-thaw cycle moves indoors, and things start to seriously deteriorate. Plugged sewers, deluged tunnels and streets reverting to rivers will conspire to waterlog foundations and destabilize their huge loads, toppling structures. Gradually the asphalt jungle will give way to a real one.

On Monday, the Staten Island Ferry was suspended, the trains to New Jersey cut off, the airports closed and Amtrak canceled its trains. The power company, Consolidated Edison, closed the steam energy facilities that provide hot water and heat to large swaths of high-rise Manhattan. (I had never heard of the steam energy facilities before.) As the storm approached landfall on Monday afternoon, the government cut off the bridges. The Statue of Liberty’s torch went black. Around 7 p.m., as the southern tip of Manhattan was engulfed in floodwater, ConEd flicked the switch and Lower Manhattan went dark. The darkness crept north. From uptown in Harlem we watched on YouTube the video of a transistor exploding somewhere on the east side, leaving the city dark as far north as 39th Street. City workers evacuated hospitals where back-up generators had failed.

Some beacons remained. We looked at the photo of the carousel with water lapping at its edges in Brooklyn Bridge Park, still somehow floodlit. At the tip of Manhattan the lights at Goldman Sachs headquarters in the waterlogged financial district burned alone through the night, powered by some sort of off-grid generator that was too big to fail.

Water cascaded across the city, although it had barely rained. The power in Harlem never went off, and we watched on our computers as water flooded the tunnels, the edges of Manhattan, the construction site at Ground Zero, the avenues of Alphabet City, where stranded taxis bobbed like rubber ducks. In Frederick Law Olmsted’s city parks the stately trees fell down. The emergency phone system was overwhelmed. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s charismatic sign language interpreter, Lydia Callis, became a celebrity, and Bloomberg’s custom of closing his press conferences with a summary of the most important points in mangled Spanish seemed suddenly heroic.

The day after the storm, the subways still closed, the lights still on, I read George Oppen’s poem ‘Of Being Numerous’:

We are pressed, pressed on each other,
We will be told at once
Of anything that happens

Feliz Dia das Bruxas >:-[

Happy Halloween >:-[

Hilary Mantel wins the WOMan Booker ;)

His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horse-back, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws.

Later, Henry will say, 'Your girls flew well today'. The hawk Anne Cromwell bounces on the glove of Rafe Sadler, who rides by the king in easy conversation. They are tired; the sun is declining, and they ride back to Wolf Hall with the reins slack on the necks of their mounts. Tomorrow his wife and two sisters will go out. These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated. Weightless, they glide on the upper currents of the air. They pity no one. They answer to no one.

Their lives are simple. When they look down they see nothing but their prey, and the borrowed plumes of the hunters: they see a flittering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner. All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying; the beating off and the whipping in of hounds, coddling of tired horses, the nursing, by the gentlemen, of contusions, sprains and blisters. And for a few days at least, the sun has shone on Henry. Sometime before noon, clouds scudded in from the west and rain fell in big scented drops; but the sun re-emerged with a scorching heat, and now the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.

As they dismount, handing their horses to the grooms and waiting on the king, his mind is already moving to paperwork: to dispatches from Whitehall, galloped down by the post routes that are laid wherever the court shifts. At supper with the Seymours, he will defer to any stories his hosts wish to tell: to anything the king may venture, tousled and happy and amiable as he seems tonight. When the king has gone to bed, his working night will begin.

Though the day is over, Henry seems disinclined to go indoors. He stands looking about him, inhaling horse sweat, a broad, brick-red streak of sunburn across his forehead. Early in the day he lost his hat, so by custom all the hunting party were obliged to take off theirs. The king refused all offers of substitutes. As dusk steals over the woods and fields, servants will be out looking for the stir of the black plume against darkening grass, or the glint of his hunter's badge, a gold St Hubert with sapphire eyes.

Already you can feel the autumn. You know there will not be many more days like these; so let us stand, the horseboys of Wolf Hall swarming around us, Wiltshire and the western counties stretching into a haze of blue; let us stand, the king's hand on his shoulder, Henry's face earnest as he talks his way back through the landscape of the day, the green copses and rushing streams, the alders by the water's edge, the early haze that lifted by nine; the brief shower, the small wind that died and settled; the stillness, the afternoon heat.

'Sir, how are you not burned?' Rafe Sadler demands. A redhead like the king, he has turned a mottled, freckled pink, and even his eyes look sore. He, Thomas Cromwell, shrugs; he hangs an arm around Rafe's shoulders as they drift indoors. He went through the whole of Italy – the battlefield as well as the shaded arena of the counting house – without losing his London pallor. His ruffian childhood, the days on the river, the days in the fields: they left him as white as God made him. 'Cromwell has the skin of a lily,' the king pronounces. 'The only particular in which he resembles that or any other blossom.' Teasing him, they amble towards supper.

The king had left Whitehall the week of Thomas More's death, a miserable dripping week in July, the hoof prints of the royal entourage sinking deep into the mud as they tacked their way across to Windsor. Since then the progress has taken in a swathe of the western counties; the Cromwell aides, having finished up the king's business at the London end, met up with the royal train in mid-August. The king and his companions sleep sound in new houses of rosy brick, in old houses whose fortifications have crumbled away or been pulled down, and in fantasy castles like toys, castles never capable of fortification, with walls a cannonball would punch in as if they were paper. England has enjoyed fifty years of peace. This is the Tudors' covenant; peace is what they offer. Every household strives to put forward its best show for the king, and we've seen some panic-stricken plastering these last weeks, some speedy stonework, as his hosts hurry to display the Tudor rose beside their own devices. They search out and obliterate any trace of Katherine, the queen that was, smashing with hammers the pomegranates of Aragon, their splitting segments and their squashed and flying seeds. Instead – if there is no time for carving – the falcon of Anne Boleyn is crudely painted up on hatchments.

Hans has joined them on the progress, and made a drawing of Anne the queen, but it did not please her; how do you please her, these days? He has drawn Rafe Sadler, with his neat little beard and his set mouth, his fashionable hat a feathered disc balanced precariously on his cropped head. 'Made my nose very flat, Master Holbein,' Rafe says, and Hans says, 'And how, Master Sadler, is it in my power to fix your nose?'

'He broke it as a child,' he says, 'running at the ring. I picked him up myself from under the horse's feet, and a sorry bundle he was, crying for his mother.' He squeezes the boy's shoulder. 'Now, Rafe, take heart. I think you look very handsome. Remember what Hans did to me.'

Thomas Cromwell is now about fifty years old. He has a labourer's body, stocky, useful, running to fat. He has black hair, greying now, and because of his pale impermeable skin, which seems designed to resist rain as well as sun, people sneer that his father was an Irishman, though really he was a brewer and a blacksmith at Putney, a shearsman too, a man with a finger in every pie, a scrapper and brawler, a drunk and a bully, a man often hauled before the justices for punching someone, for cheating someone. How the son of such a man has achieved his present eminence is a question all Europe asks. Some say he came up with the Boleyns, the queen's family. Some say it was wholly through the late Cardinal Wolsey, his patron; Cromwell was in his confidence and made money for him and knew his secrets. Others say he haunts the company of sorcerers. He was out of the realm from boyhood, a hired soldier, a wool trader, a banker. No one knows where he has been and who he has met, and he is in no hurry to tell them. He never spares himself in the king's service, he knows his worth and merits and makes sure of his reward: offices, perquisites and title deeds, manor houses and farms. He has a way of getting his way, he has a method; he will charm a man or bribe him, coax him or threaten him, he will explain to a man where his true interests lie, and he will introduce that same man to aspects of himself he didn't know existed. Every day Master Secretary deals with grandees who, if they could, would destroy him with one vindictive swipe, as if he were a fly.

Knowing this, he is distinguished by his courtesy, his calmness and his indefatigable attention to England's business. He is not in the habit of explaining himself. He is not in the habit of discussing his successes. But whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood.

At home in his city house at Austin Friars, his portrait broods on the wall; he is wrapped in wool and fur, his hand clenched around a document as if he were throttling it. Hans had pushed a table back to trap him and said, Thomas, you mustn't laugh; and they had proceeded on that basis, Hans humming as he worked and he staring ferociously into the middle distance. When he saw the portrait finished he had said, 'Christ, I look like a murderer'; and his son Gregory said, didn't you know? Copies are being made for his friends, and for his admirers among the evangelicals in Germany. He will not part with the original – not now I've got used to it, he says – and so he comes into his hall to find versions of himself in various stages of becoming: a tentative outline, partly inked in. Where to begin with Cromwell? Some start with his sharp little eyes, some start with his hat. Some evade the issue and paint his seal and scissors, others pick out the turquoise ring given him by the cardinal. Wherever they begin, the final impact is the same: if he had a grievance against you, you wouldn't like to meet him at the dark of the moon. His father Walter used to say, 'My boy Thomas, give him a dirty look and he'll gouge your eye out. Trip him, and he'll cut off your leg. But if you don't cut across him, he's a very gentleman. And he'll stand anybody a drink.'

Life of Pi - trailers

The mapping of Africa

thank you, The Guardian DataBlog :)

Münster:

Ortelius:

Blaeu:

Moll:

Hase:

Clouet:

Cary:

Tallis:

Levasseur:

Andriveau-Goujon:

(idem)

Be that cat

The Pigasus! (post to be seen listening to Pink Floyd, obviously :)

The Art of Grant Snider, who tells us:

In my exhaustive research for today's comic, I read that John Steinbeck often signed his books with a drawing of the Pigasus, a mythical flying pig. He also included the Latin motto "Ad astra per alas porci":

"To the stars on the wings of a pig."

The astounding Art of Daniel Kukla, or... California!

Here

On Banned Books, by Grant Snider

Life of Pi - the film

A first look review from The Guardian:

In his gently astonishing new film, Life of Pi, adapted from Yann Martel's 2001 bestseller, director Ang Lee melds so many disparate elements – Aesopian fable and cutting-edge 3D technology, east and west, young and old – that he may have just succeeded in rebranding himself as the Obama of world cinema. The fiercely urgent candidate of 2008, of course, not the stealth version currently working the stump.

The sheer number of world religions given a shout-out in the film – Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist – is enough to send Donald Trump's comb-over scampering up the nearest tree trunk, looking for cover.

The film takes a while to get going, like someone roused from their morning meditation, with lots of flowers and candles and people wearing kindly, fixed smiles suggesting enlightenment, or as if they had been hit around the head with a brass pot.

In French India, the young son of a zoo owner collects world religions the way other kids collect stamps. "They were my superheroes," he says, checking off a list of deities. Such good karma, sad to say, doesn't necessarily make for good drama. You're almost grateful for the arrival of the storm that sinks the boat bearing Pi, his family and their animal entourage to the new world, leaving the boy alone on a boat with one of his father's tigers. They are soon pacing around one other with the same mixture of wariness and hungriness last seen on the faces of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Lee's 2005 Brokeback Mountain.

One of the things that tells you the director is in his prime – a model of creative evolution – is that his films feel like total surprises when first announced but fit snugly into his oeuvre once you've seen them. Immersing himself in the latest technology — 3D, digital paintboxes, motion capture and control – as Martin Scorsese did in last year's Hugo, Lee summons delights with his fingertips. But where Hugo was cold to the touch, Life of Pi feels warm-blooded, the perfect summation of the principle powering Lee's entire career: still waters run deep. You see it both in the Zen minimalism of his compositions – check out the shots of sky reflected in a glassy ocean, the boat suspended in the middle as if hanging in thin air – and the sonar-like skill with which he sounds out the emotional depths of Martel's tale. Lee's pixels are animated by empathy.

Life of Pi feels so simple, yet knotted with resonance, that you wonder why Lee bothered with the framing narrative in which a grown-up Pi chews over the spiritual implications of his tale with a writer in Toronto. For one thing, the argument they come up with for the existence of God turns out to bear a suspicious similarity to an argument for the all-round grooviness of magic realism. For another: Toronto. A nice city, but its neat patches of parkland and grey high-rises are no match for breaching whales, phosphorescent fish and crouching tigers, or the sight if Pi, howling like Job into stormy skies.

Hollywood has been waiting for this movie. Get ready for the year of the Tiger. 

International Music Day ;)

International Music Day or World Music Day is a concept too good to believe and the best part is that it actually exists. Yes, International Music day or the IMD was initiated on the 1st of October in 1975 by Lord Yehudi Menuhin. It was first organized by the International Music Council on 1st of October, 1975, in accordance with the resolution taken at the 15th General Assembly in Lausanne in 1973.

The International Music Council (IMC) or the guardian of the IMD was founded by UNESCO in 1949. The IMC is the world's largest network of organizations, institutions and individuals functioning in the field of music. The International Music Council encourages and fosters musical diversity, access to culture for everyone and unites organizations in some 150 countries worldwide in building peace and understanding among people cutting across class, culture and heritage.

The IMC in its bid to establish a global harmony through the music, celebrates the International Music Day and with special focus on organizing musical events, radio and television programs and press recordings. Amidst all this the onus is also on building up an environment more conducive and hospitable to music-on the practice, consumption and the general aura of music. So, an important zone of interest is also struggle against the pollution of the sound environment and quite interestingly the IMC proposes that each country should maintain a few moments of silence on the International Music Day, and use that silence to listen to music played out in main city squares.

On International Music Day, the desired aim is to create a global atmosphere of music, a platform for people to come together with their diversities and mingle to make one unified whole. Like any other artistic or cultural celebrations the day is generally to celebrate art and to successfully realize these activities, it is essential to mobilize all means at our disposal in the 21st century-the radio and television, concert societies, opera companies, amateur societies; a great many different types of localities should all be used to their best advantage.

In various countries the day is the perfect opportunity to organize grand concerts by roping in the greatest musical artistes of our. Also common are random musical events and talent shows to seek out the new and emerging musical artistes- to build up a treasury of the old and new in the world of music. Music after all is the greatest unifier in humanity and all significant social events have musical pieces dedicated to it. No event is better recognized or defined than by music which defines and completes a perfect human social and aesthetic experience.