Russ Coffey has interviewed Alpha Course's Sandy Millar (one of the Alpha founders at Holy Trinity Brompton), the next stage of his investigation into the systems, institutions and beliefs we place faith in and commit to: "I found Millar to be very skillfully non-communicative. I didn’t realise how little he had actually said on some issues until I played the tape back." (Also: Russ on Scientology.)
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Excellent JG Ballard interview on terrorism, art, media, government, pyschopathology.... On art influences:
The surrealists were a revelation, though reproductions of Chirico, Dali, Ernst were hard to come by and tended to be found in psychiatric textbooks. I devoured them..The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.
I read a great deal too in the late 1940s, but from the international menu (Freud, Kafka, Camus, Orwell, Aldous Huxley) rather than the English one. But there was a defeatist strain in the modern novel (which quite appealed to me as a moody 16-year-old). A huge internal migration had taken place from Joyce onwards, and there was something airless about Ulysses. By contrast, the great modern painters, from Picasso to Francis Bacon, were eager to wrestle with the world, like the brutal lovers on one of Bacon's couches. There was a reek of semen that quickened the blood.
I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the fault of the writers. There's something about the novel that resists innovation.
[...] Meanwhile, too much is made of conceptual art - putting it crudely, someone has been shitting in Duchamp's urinal, and there is an urgent need for a strong dose of critical Parazone.
Iain Sinclair foreword to Wells's War of the Worlds (via City of Sound)
The impact of this 1898 novel lies in its topographic verisimilitude, its forensic examination of the comfortably mundane, the complacency of Surrey suburbia, railway towns surrounded by golf links, tame heathland, somewhere to walk a dog. [...]- Wells's list of place-names seems to foreshadow Eliot's Wasteland ('Trams and dusty trees./Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew/Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees/Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.'/'My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart/Under my feet.)The War of the Worlds is told with tabloid speed and the lovely poetry of the commonplace. The mood of The Time Machine, Wells's first novel, published in 1895, is much more leisurely, post-prandial; a pre-Raphaelite fable with sinister shadows. Episodes unfold at their own pace, allowing space for lengthy digressions. The War of the Worlds happens in the world of fast news, telegrams, electricity. The false dynamic - of stock-market reports, global investments - is superimposed on slow-moving village life (pubs, horses, hedgerows). Railways are now more significant features than rivers (which prove no barrier to the advance of the Martian tripods).
Terse reportage works like radio before its time. Cutting is rapid.
And Peter Cho's Typotranslation of Orson Welles's infamous 1938 radio version.
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Renzo Piano interview: Zentrum Paul Klee (registration required)
The friendship of orthopaedist Müller, pianist Pollini and architect Piano catalyses the creation of the Paul Klee Centre, Bern - sadly not quite a collaboration, even though the images of the centre suggest a form that's close to spinal. (Via Tesugen, who is tantalising those of us who don't read Svenska with this piece about Johan Fogh on Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House)
More Renzo Piano: Tesugen on Tusa's interview with RP and on the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (and the bottega model). And "Architecture is art that you do to shelter something else".
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