The Makomanai Cemetery outside of Sapporo, Japan, wanted to highlight the huge Buddha statue they had on their grounds. They hired Tadao Ando to do just that, and he solved the problem by hiding the statue. From Spoon and Tamago's article Ando Tadao’s Hill of Buddha:
“Our idea was to cover the Buddha below the head with a hill of lavender plants,” said Ando. Indeed, as you approach “Hill of Buddha” the subject is largely concealed by a hill planted with 150,000 lavenders. Only the top of the statue’s head pokes out from the rotunda, creating a visual connection between the lavender plants and the ringlets of hair on the Buddha statue’s head.
Above is Gustave Doré's The Enigma. It shows a battle field, with dead soldiers scattered in the foreground. Chillingly, mixed with ther soldiers' corpses are also the bodies of a family -- a father, mother, and two children -- embracing each other in death. The battle seems to have moved on, for in the background we see smoke rising from the flames of further conflict.
In the center foreground, as the focus of the painting, are two metaphysical beings: an angel and a sphinx. They stare intently at each other, almost in an embrace. If you look up information on the painting it was done in the aftermath of France losing the Franco-Prussian war and the angel represents France in defeat and the sphinx is posing the unanswerable riddle, "why war?"
Before reading Doré's explanation of the painting, I thought of the two mythical creatures as the prime movers of the conflict. The two forces that were behind the seemingly endless and ever spreading battle. In the middle of that chaos they confront each other, touch each other, as if their arousal by the violence was the purpose of it all.
Well, yeah, I read the painting wrong, but for this post I'll go with the wrong reading.
I've watched a number of videos of antifa and the hard cases on the alt-right; and by hard cases of the alt-right I don't mean Trump supporters protesting, I mean the type that go to protests intending to punch back at the antifa goons. The videos are ugly, with both sides circling each other like barking dogs working up the courage to lunge in and bite.
Politics and current events aside, at a certain level both groups are just street fighters looking for a brawl. It is what they want to do, and they need each other to do it. They are like the angel and the sphinx in my misreading of Doré's painting, lovingly embracing each other oblivious of the carnage around themselves.
Sadly, we are the carnage. We need to push them all back to the fringe, and not at the focus which they more and more dominate. We will all suffer the longer the thugs run wild.
La Boite Verte's post Des illustrations de manuscrits d’alchimie has a good collection of Alchemist illustrations. These images, and those after the jump, are a sample of some of those images. Their esoteric nature makes them fascinating, with a hint of magic and the dark arts about them.
La Boite Verte is in French, but it is easy to find the links to their sources, which are in English. Also, there are many more -- and larger -- images at La Boite Verte.
In the early years of the 20th century Witchita County, Texas was experiencing an oil boom. Many people were moving there for jobs and the local infrastructure was stressed, with office space in particular being in short supply.
To solve that problem J.D. McMahon, a Philadelphia developer, proposed building a skyscraper in the town of Witchita Falls and started selling stock in his venture. Investors poured some $200,000 into the venture.
However, when the towering skyscraper was built it was only 40ft tall, rather than the 480 feet the investors expected. Alas for them, the scale on the blueprints was in square inches, not square feet as they thought, and there was no remedy for the swindle.
In its day you could barely fit four desks into one of its floors and it fell into disuse. However, it somehow managed to avoid demolition over the decades, and in 2000 it was renovated and now serves as a tourist attraction and antique shop.
