Welcome to day 5 of 25 of giveaways, the brainchild of the lovely Tina from Living without Sophia and Ellie
I am honoured to be a part of this.
Christmas is about families and this can be a painful time of year because of the loved ones who aren't here to share it with us. So my giveaway is this.
We will design a flower print that includes the names of ALL loved ones in your family, both absent and present. I will send you the JPEG so you can get it made into Christmas cards if you wish, and I will also send you an 11"x14" poster print of your flower as well.
My brother and I will work with you to ensure we create something absolutely perfect.
I have put some pictures below but they are simply suggestions. You can visit "Rory's Garden" by clicking on the " Say it with Flowers" button on my sidebar.
To enter please leave a comment with what flowers you'd like us to work with. Please bear in mind we are in Australia so we may not be able to do it, but believe me we will do our best.
I'll close off this giveaway 36 hours from now and announce the winner shortly after.
Thank you x

[Image: Photo by Lauren Greenfield for The New York Times].

There are two photo-essays circulating that benefit from juxtaposed browsing. On the one hand, you've got a series of images taken by Lauren Greenfield for The New York Times of Dubai in decline. This, of course, comes as Dubai's debt obligations have become so unmanageable that the city-state is actually causing trembles in the entire global economy.

[Image: Ad hoc infrastructure: "A convoy of sewage trucks removing solid waste from the city center. The current sewer system cannot handle the demand." Photo by Lauren Greenfield for The New York Times].

Indeed, financial historians are living through an extraordinarily interesting time, I have to say; the complex instrumentation of money has never been so Baroque or histrionic. Calculations are made so fast now that the physical location of buildings, vis-a-vis the speed of the data signals they receive, can actually impact urban geography. Call it nanofinance. More to the point, earlier this week the Guardian had this to say:

The Dubai crisis has also thrown a new name into the lexicon of toxic instruments. Just as credit derivatives helped to exacerbate the sub-prime crisis by obscuring who was ultimately exposed to losses, the use of Islamic finance has complicated the reckoning. "Sukuk bonds" are designed to get around religious laws banning the payment of interest for money lending. But one of the most volatile debts in the Dubai World standstill is a $3.5bn Islamic bond due to be repaid in December.

It's not just comparative religion, in other words, it's comparative religious finance.

But view Greenfield's images alongside an equally memorable group of photos, this time documenting drug wars in Rio de Janeiro, that future Olympic city plagued—like New York City—by the occasional blackout.

[Images: (top) "A BOPE unit, the elite special forces of the military police stands guard during the operation in Favela da Grota. BOPE is a small group of well-trained officers infamous for their brutality. They are renowned for not carrying handcuffs." (bottom) "A BOPE officer takes a defensive position to cover his unit as they pull out of the Grota slum." Photos by João Pina for the Guardian].

The article that accompanies these images is less compelling, even for its descriptions of "the favela—a mess of slapped-up houses of corrugated tin and unpainted brick, dreadlocked tangles of pilfered electrical wiring, and graffiti-covered walls and alleyways where little shops and rudimentary bars selling beer and cachaça jostled for space with storefront evangelical churches."

But these contrasting images of cities gone wild—one lost in a kind of financial syncope, a rococo without reference to manageable interest or ground plane, the other made politically incomprehensible by the overlapping invisibilities of heavily armed, microsovereign warlords, whether under government control or not—show us global urbanism as it steps into a surprisingly dark maturity in this second decade of the 21st-century.

(Article about "Sukuk bonds" found via @nicolatwilley).

[Image: Christmas trees for sale outside St. Mark's Church in New York City; a video-still taken November 30th, 2009].

"The most surreal part of Christmas," architect and blogger Sam Jacob wrote two years ago, "is the migratory forest that pops up all around us for three weeks."

It's a long forgotten middle European folk-rite that has become buried deep in our seasonal behaviour. Now, thousands of years later, we re-enact this midwinter over and over again in a thoroughly contemporary manner. Christmas trees now may well be entirely and unashamedly artificial objects: pink, fibre optic, colour-changing nylon. Real organic trees appear in the most surreal of locations: strapped to the cab of a crane high above the city, in arrays over the facades of department stores, in the sterile shiny lobbies of corporate institutions, and in the front rooms of homes sitting on carpets which, if you think hard enough, become the mossy floor of a forest...

It's an image that has stuck with me: Christmas and its ubiquitous tree treated as a kind of vernacular landscape practice—or folk forestry—more than a religious event with Rapturous implications.

"Perhaps Christmas trees are a ghostly return of the mysterious ancient forest," Jacob suggests, "a rolling back of the mechanisms and constructs of civilisation that addresses the Big Bad Wolf or Little Red Riding Hood inside us all."

The dudes of Holiday Shores make stuff like a tropical sunrise.

Before starting I would like to remind Annabella that it is two weeks until the anniversary of her first (and only) blog entry.

Not that I am being critical - but I am anxious to see how she has moved on since 17 December 2008. I would particularly (for example) like to see some pictures of Stan and Ollie so that I can compare their plumpness with Monika.

We are now in the Swissotel overlooking the Bosphorus and Cate has gone off to do things with other people in the office. I used to do these sorts things and would go to the office every day to talk to people, have meetings, write notes and talk on the telephone.

At breakfast this morning I marveled at all the people having meetings about really vital things when all I had to do was wonder about where I was going to go to mooch around for the day.

You will see that I have an Internet connection. I was able to achieve this because my operating system is now in English and I can work my way through the maze of questions which need to be answered in order to establish a connection. It is horrendously expensive to do this in the hotel but I pawned my watch so that I could hook up long enough to post a Blog.

Since we arrived in Wien we have wanted to go to Do & Co. We have tried to book on a few occasions but have never been able to get in. Indeed – we could not for last Saturday for the main restaurant in Kärntnerstrasse so settled for the one in the Albertina.

Do & Co does the catering for Austrian Airlines so when Cate travels Business Class she gets to eat the food. I have had it twice when we flew Austrian Airlines on home leave and it is outstanding.

Of course some of the planes are not in real good shape. We have been on planes that were so old they had toilet seats held together with gaffer tape and they had to paint over the Swastikas on the wings – but this and the constant rattling and loose bits falling from the ceiling are nothing if you can have a decent meal.

Anyway Do & Co in Albertina was brilliant – and smoke free – and I can thoroughly recommend it.

We were not in Business Class coming to Turkey but I had a nice sandwich which I was able to scrunch up and insert into my nostrils so that I could not smell the very fat, hairy and odorous man seated next to me. He took up a great deal of room and I spent the flight perched at an angle hoping that my jacket wouldn't get stuck to his hairy forearms and require us to be separated by the emergency crews in Istanbul.

I was flicking around on the TV looking for something I could do to avoid learning German irregular verbs when I saw someone who looked like George Hamilton’s grandfather dressed in rags sitting on a log.

A watching this for a few minutes I realised that this was no ordinary TV show but something special – because I also recognised Joe Bugner who was at one stage the British Heavyweight Boxing Champion and now lives in Australia.

So I discovered this show ‘I’m a Celebrity – get me out of here’ (IACGMOOH).

I now know that this is a show where they take people who were almost famous and put them in the jungle where they wrestle snakes and eat beetles.

This is not a problem as we have discussed before that there are 350,000 different types of beetles and while it is tough going for the beetles that get eaten – and of course their families – it would do their little hearts good to know that millions of people around the world are watching them get eaten and this is a damned sight more coverage than they would get by being eaten in the dead of night by a Lesser Crested Mugwump.

I did a bit of research on IACGMOOH and they apparently do lots of other very unsavory things - many involving ropes, snakes and mud – I am not sure why but it is TV and apparently that’s what people want to watch – no I don’t know why – it beats the hell out of me.

Anyway – it was George Hamilton. What in the name of the Great Lizard King is George doing in a show like this where he can’t wear a tan and a cravat?

And I regret to say that Joe was beaten in whatever the contest was he had with a much younger man and was booted off the reservation – which was in Australia somewhere.

I read too much current affairs and too much history and I know things that it is not good for a person to know and to dwell on.

I am just about to delve into a ‘Europe: A History’ by Norman Davies. This runs to about 1,500 pages so it may be a while before I can report back. In the interim for the Turkey trip I am reading about Ataturk. I have to do this so that I can tell Cate all about the history of modern Turkey.

She can in turn belabor me with the history of the Habsburgs. She has told me many things about this enormous family but so far I have retained nothing.

Today I am going walking to take photos.

We moved to Seattle two weeks ago and in that time I have noticed quite a few differences from Atlanta:

• People are nice. Really nice. I have particularly noticed this when interacting with people in service jobs (Comcast installer, DMV employees, etc.) who not only are nice but appear to be competent, as well. I have yet to see the "I hate my job" attitude that everyone in similar positions in Atlanta seem to have. Of course, that attitude rubs off in the way you are treated... ugh.
  
• The speed limit is not 85 MPH wherever you go. People actually do seem to follow the speed limit more closely here instead of going Warp Speed everywhere. And drivers are nice, too! Of course that may be because everyone thinks I'm a tourist because of my Georgia plates... we'll see if that changes when I get Washington state plates.
• Recycling. Whoa. We were good recyclers in Atlanta. We filled up our recycling bin to overflowing. So we bought a larger, 65 gallon rolling bin which was often filled up to capacity or beyond every other week. Yet we still filled up a 96 gallon "Herby Curby" every week with trash. Now we have a small 12 gallon (!!!) trash can, a 65 gallon (I think?) recycling can (with a wide variety of recyclables accepted, much more so than in ATL) and a can specifically for food waste composting. We pay for the trash we generate and pay extra if we overflow our garbage can or include too many recyclables or too much food waste in the garbage, so it pays to reduce, reuse and recycle. We've had to adjust our habits, but we're making it work, even with all of the extra waste we have generated from moving in. I keep looking at Steph and saying how amazed I am at the tiny amount of trash we're generating these days. I find it eye opening to see the amount of food waste we can generate. Some of it is inevitable (banana peels, orange peels, chicken carcasses, etc.), but a lot of it can be saved and repurposed (trimmings from carrots, celery, etc. can be put into stock, for example). At least I don't see us wasting food like we did when I was traveling non-stop...
  
• Groceries are expensive. Safeway is way overpriced, I can't imagine how expensive Whole Foods is. Fred Meyer appears to be the most reasonable of the bunch.
• Elfin ears? Seriously... I saw someone with a pair last night and they looked pretty freaking real to me, though I suppose they could have been makeup.
  
• Cupcakes. Yum.

I'm sure there is more for another post...

Two wannabe reality TV stars crashed a White House Dinner and want to sell their story for ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’. Has it come to this that people would pay them money to tell how they walked into the White House and had their photo taken with the President. What a breathless, tense and dramatic story this would be.

‘Well we walked into the White House and the security people didn’t stop us so we had out photo taken with the President’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Oh really nice he said hi’

‘Oh Fabulous stuff – and what happened then?’

‘Well nothing really. We left.’

‘OK Great – look forward to the book. Who would you like to play your parts in the movie?'

'Hmm....not sure about that yet but probably Brad and Angelina.'

I was fortunate enough to witness the ecstatic The Tallest Man On Earth-show on the 20th November in YO-Talo, Tampere. The evening had been a fine one with warm-up acts including Liechtenstein and Taxi Taxi! and it was soon going to get even better as The Tallest Man On Earth, born Kristian Matsson, climbed on stage and began his one-man folk-boogie.

His evasive appearance as he wandered to and fro and about on the stage gave a sharp contrast to the soul-piercing, slightly dylanesque presence of his voice. From the first couple of chords it was obvious it was going to be a great show but I shortly discovered it was in fact going to be one of the best I've seen in ages. If you ever have the chance to go and see this guy play live, do go!

The Tallest Man On Earth will be releasing a new album next January. Here's hoping its promotional tour will bring him back to Finland.

The Tallest Man On Earth - The Gardener

Minimalistic graphic design for a poster or cover.

More at Sevensheaven.nl

Palau 2008. Photos by Philippe Lebris of Marseille.

A reminder that we are off to Turkey on Tuesday. This may mean that I cannot Blog because my track record of getting an internet connection while we are travelling is not so good – awful in fact.

However – there may be some hope this time as when I upgraded to Windows 7 I was able to change the operating system on my notebook PC to English. This means that when the numerous error messages appear as I am trying to connect to the internet - I may be able to decipher them and take remedial action. We shall see.

Cate is working for three days and the we are renting a car and driving to Gallipoli. The Turkish one not the Italian one. Gallipoli – as all Australians know –is one of the many places where the Australians benefited from legendary British war planning and tactics.

Gallipoli

They didn’t manage to kill us all at Gallipoli but shipped the survivors off to the Somme where the Germans used us for gunnery practice until they ran out of shells and had to surrender.

Incidentally – the nice people at the Palazzo del Corso in Gallipoli in Italy allowed me to cancel my reservation without any cost. They no doubt did this on the basis that anyone stupid enough to book a hotel in the wrong country would be dangerous to have as a guest -and they could not guarantee that I would not turn up there instead of Turkey. So next time you go to Gallipoli in Italy please stay with them.

I took Cate to the Central Friedhof at Simmering on Sunday and she was most impressed – as I knew she would be. It is a colossal cemetery and well worth a visit. For some reason the old Jewish section is entirely overgrown and not maintained at all.

There could be a number of reasons for this including that there were not a whole lot of Jews left in Wien after the war – and are not that many now. Or maybe they decided to let it become overgrown for dramatic effect – and it certainly works.

Parts of the Jewish section were bombed during the war. Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris was entirely focused on flattening Germany and Austria (well the residential parts anyway) and it is a bizarre thought that in this process he bombed dead Jews.

I finished reading a book last week that suggested that the war could have been shortened by some months had Churchill and others been able persuade Mr. Harris to bomb something useful – say for example the synthetic oil plants.

But he was very single minded – and popular in Britain – and instead of being sacked for disobeying direct orders from his superiors he was allowed month after month to flatten every city in Germany.

The additional penalty for this – apart from the obvious one of costing the lives of very many allied soldiers because the war went on for months longer than it should have – was that when the allies arrived in the German cities that had been subjected to Bomber’s attention – the infrastructure was completely destroyed – and the Americans and British had to start from scratch to rebuild Europe.

They erected a statue to Arthur Harris in London a few years ago and there were many protestors. For my money I think Harris should have been hanged as a war criminal – but in war this only ever happens to the losers.

Many things these days make me unhappy. One is the annihilation of sharks globally for finning. This grotesque and barbaric practice kills millions of sharks each year and is one of the major contributors to the death of ocean life.

However, in Australia we have had not had to resort to finning to kill all our sharks and have done it by more subtle means. A report in the Sydney Morning Herald says that:

“A new survey of grey nurse sharks shows the species is still in severe danger of becoming extinct.

The study, commissioned by the Federal Government, found just over 1,000 of the sharks along the east coast of Australia.

That figure is significantly lower than the 5,000 needed to sustain the population.
Accidental hooking is one of the main threats to the survival of the species.

Nicky Hammond, the marine program manager for the National Parks Association of New South Wales, says the State Government must act now to protect key habitat sites.

"Here we've got a critically endangered species, we know what the key threat to their survival is, we know where they spend the majority of their time," she said.

"It's a relatively simple process to protect those sites from that key threat of fishing by creating marine sanctuaries and that way hopefully we can actually save this shark from going extinct.

"Time and time again they continue to ignore putting in place the proper protection of marine sanctuaries in these areas and provide tokenistic protection instead.

"We're calling on the NSW Government, we're saying enough is enough, that we need to now get these sanctuaries in place before the shark goes extinct."

Now grey nurse sharks are pretty well the most harmless critters on the planet. In the 60s I used to surf with these creatures and it was not unusual at dusk to catch a wave and find yourself alongside a grey nurse shark.

Cate and I have dived with these sharks many times and I have patted them (If pat is the right word.

One of the major killers of sharks on the East Coast of Australia is the nets used to ‘protect’ surfers from sharks. Long nets are strung off beaches and these catch and kill sharks in their thousands – or did - nowadays of course there are so few sharks that the catch rate has dropped to negligible proportions.

You would think that this may prompt governments to stop netting and give the sharks a chance – no way. Nothing will be done and in a few years or sooner the grey nurse shark will be extinct and we will be added to the many thousands of species that have vanished since the arrival of the white man in Australia.

The recreational and commercial fishing lobbies in NSW in particular have as much power there as the NRA does in the USA. They dictate what governments can and cannot do – and grey nurse sharks are not high on their list of priorities.

I used to fret about this and about many other things like it. I now understand that the destruction of many species is unstoppable. We are rapacious beasts and absolutely nothing will be allowed to stand between us and the next meal – or the next dollar.

Reasons why you should NOT have a joint email account with your husband....
Reason One: they send you sympathy texts about a job you didn't get, without knowing that you didn't in fact already know that you hadn't got the job, because YOU hadn't had time to read your email because you are too busy doing THEIR laundry after a blissful weekend away, and putting up the Christmas tree and writing Christmas cards with your children
Reason Two: then you phone them and ask them what are they talking about and all they tell you is to "read your email."
Reason Three: you read YOUR email and then phone them back to yell at them for telling you that you hadn't got the job.
Reason Four: Husband ends up bewildered, and you are left with an unquenchable longing for some seriously good cheesecake.
And that, dear friends is why you shouldn't have a joint email account with your husband.
Oh and I didn't get the job. Not even an interview.
But my daughter drew this. (Her interpretation of The Nativity)

It's what matters.
Really it is.
But feel free to send me some cheesecake.

Mon - 0

Tues - 10.5 miles (2,700'). 1:36. Horsetooth - Westridge - Spring Creek - Wathan - Horsetooth - home. Never run this particular route before, but it's definitely a great and relatively pain free way to get some good climbing done on limited miles. Felt great today, like really good.

Weds - 10.5 miles (2,700'). 1:41. As yesterday but slower. Wanted to at least try and save something for what I hope will be pie day on Thursday.

Thurs - 7 miles. 3 mile warm up, 4 mile race. Pie secured.

Fri - 10.5 miles (2,700'). 1:41. As Monday. Legs were complete molasses. Little bit sore in achilles/lower calf area. Ground it out.

Sat - 20.5 miles (4,900'). 3:29. Rock to Rock to Rock. Home - Horsetooth - Westridge - Mill Creek - Howard - Arthur's Rock trail to parking lot - East Valley - Mill Creek - Westridge - Horsetooth - home. This was a tough workout on tired legs, but I got it done safe in the knowledge that I've got an easy week coming up.

A new Horsetooth/Lory route for me, and it was all about racking vertical. Three climbs and three descents with 3-4 miles of rolling. The climbs go 1,200', 1,000', 1,500'. Went from my house into the park and then straight up on the Horsetooth trail (1,200') to the Westridge traverse for two miles of rolling, then the loose, rocky descent on Mill Creek into Lory and then up Howard (my favorite trail in Lory - killer reservoir/hogback views) to Arthur's Rock (1,000'). Straight down on Arthur's Rock trail all the way to the parking lot, and then short stint on East Valley to the Mill Creek connector for the 1,500' haul up Mill Creek and back down to upper Horsetooth parking via Westridge and Horsetooth hiking trail.

I figured about 19 miles out and back from the parking lot with a touch under 5k of climbing. I didn't bother hitting the peaks but with that added on, the run would be closer to 21 and probably 5,800'. For a legitimate FoCo R2R2R I guess you'd need to tag Horsetooth both times and Arthur's in the middle. Next time maybe.

Sun - 14.5 miles (3,000'). 2:18. Horsetooth Big Loop. Went easy on this one. Legs felt way better than yesterday, but still kind of sluggish.

Total: 73.5 miles (16,000')

Not quite sure why I decided to work in this four-week block of hills, but every run I've done in the last 28 days - with the exception of the turkey race - has involved at least 1,500' of climb, with a cumulative total of 55,000'. Partly I want to be fit and ready to race at the Ghost Town 38.5 miler in January - and hills are the quickest way for me to achieve that - but mostly I just enjoy the trails I run on and they happen to be very hilly ones.

So probably going to jump in and do the Xmas Classic 4 miler here in FoCo in a couple of weeks - see if I can beat my time from Thursday - and then gear up for the big Boxing Day run in Saltwood back home. Easy week upcoming. Hard work begins in January.

It's been a fantastic holiday week for The BLDGBLOG Book. I was thrilled to see, for instance, that the Wall Street Journal chose the book—amidst only 36 books—for their 2009 "Holiday Book Guide." For good or for bad, The BLDGBLOG Book pops up as one of six titles that the newspaper specifically recommends for "a young artist who enjoys science fiction and high brow fantasy" (!), alongside books by Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Jeff VanderMeer, R. Crumb, and Geoff Dyer. So thanks, Wall Street Journal! That was genuinely awesome news.

Check out the rest of their picks here.

However, Planetizen also picked up on the book for their list of the Top 10 Books to read in 2010. "The Planetizen editorial staff based its 2010 edition list on a number of criteria," we read, "including editorial reviews, popularity, Planetizen reader nominations, number of references, sales figures, recommendations from experts and the book's potential impact on the urban planning, development and design professions." Again, it's great company to be in, including David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries, Eric Sanderson's Mannahatta, Green Metropolis by David Owen, Paul Goldberger's Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture, and many more.

Planetizen itself is also an extremely useful and interesting website in its own right, with a strong editorial team, so definitely spend some time clicking around there in the new year.

In any case, it's more than obvious that not everyone thinks the book—or this website—deserves these sorts of appearances, but I'm still excited to see it popping up out there in the world. Go, little book, go!

And, to be honest, whether or not you like the topics I cover here, to see a book about architecture in something like the Wall Street Journal's top 36 picks for the entire year should be good news for anyone who thinks that people don't want to read about the built environment. There is an intense and very widespread interest in architecture out there, and so I'm very happy to see that audience being recognized.

Best audio quality (IPlayer)

Audio

Supersonics/Errol Brown – Arabian Dub – Treasure Isle
Supersonics/Errol Brown – Ballistic Queen – Treasure Isle
Professor Nuts – Crazy Glue – VP Records
Super Beagle - Dust a sound boy – VP Records
Little Kirk - Kill a sound – VP Records
Dub Invasion – Stryding – Silverback Records
Pinch – Get up (feat. Yolanda) – Tectonic
Pupajim – Double lock – Maffi
Alborosie – I can’t stand it (feat. Dennis Brown) – Greensleeves
Cutty Ranks & Marcia Griffiths – Half idiot –VP Records
Courtney Melody – Bad boy – VP Records
Nitty Gritty – Hog in a minty - VP Records
Half Pint - Level the vibes - VP Records
Cocoa Tea – Rough inna town (feat Luciano) - VP Records
Kenny Knots – Unbreakable – Roots Garden
Tapes – Upside ya head (riddim cassette master) – mp3



Bob Andy – Songbooks Pt.2

Bob Andy & Marcia Griffiths - Always Together - Coxsone 7”
Bob Andy - Feeling Soul - FAB 7” UK
Sound Dimension - Feeling Soul Part Two - FAB
Bob Andy - Feeling Soul - Studio One
Sound Dimension - Feeling Soul Part Two - Studio One
Roy Richards – Rocking - Muzik City Blank
Bob Andy - Feeling Soul - Coxsone
Bob Andy - Feeling Soul - Studio One
Bob Andy - Crime Don’t Pay - Coxsone
Ken Boothe - I Don’t Want To See You Cry - Studio One
Ken Boothe - I Don’t Want To See You Cry - Studio One

Compiled by Harry “Mr.Classics” Hawke

DJ Riot - Mermaid Dub - Faster Dub
The Black Dog - Tunnels OV Set (Autechre Remix) - Soma
Ricardo Jerfferson - A Brutal Truth - Third Ear
Robert Hood - Range - M Plant
Kirk Degiorgio - Tranverse - B-12
Edward Williams - First Fossils - Blue Greens - Trunk Records

In keeping with my traditional avoidance of Black Friday sales, I took a stroll through the arboretum. I was delighted to find a color scheme of the Gray Bird grasshopper that I hadn't seen before.

Can you see him in there? How did I manage to find him in that tangled little plant? It's a disease. I can't help myself. My eyes just go there. Obssessive-compulsive bug finding. That's what it is.



Look at that white thorax-collar he has on!

[Image: The Georgian cave monastery of Vardzia, via Wikipedia].

Vardzia is a ruined honeycomb of arched passageways and artificially enlarged caves on a steep mountainside in Georgia. It is on a "tentative list" for UNESCO World Heritage status.

[Image: Vardzia, via Wikipedia].

Quoting from Wikipedia:

The monastery was constructed as protection from the Mongols, and consisted of over six thousand apartments in a thirteen-story complex. The city included a church, a throne room, and a complex irrigation system watering terraced farmlands. The only access to the complex was through some well hidden tunnels near the Mtkvari river.

Nearby are the ruins of another cave monastery, called Vanis Kvabebi.

[Images: Vardzia, via Wikipedia].

In the formal application sent to UNESCO for consideration of the site, we read that the architecture of this region can be seen as spatially punctuating the landscape, supplying moments of almost grammatical emphasis:

Fortresses and churches erected on high mountains and hills are perceived as distinguished vertical accents in such a horizontally developed setting. They terminate and emphasise natural verticals, being in perfect harmony with the latter. They introduce great emotional impulse imparting specific grandeur to the whole environment. The same artistic affect is created by rock-cut monasteries and villages arranged in several tiers on high rocky mountain slopes.

Originally constructed in the 12th century—in a region inhabited by humans since at least neolithic times—and very much resembling one of the cave-cities of Cappadocia, Vardzia is a spatially fantastic site (and, I'd assume, a videogame level waiting to happen).

[Images: Vardzia, via Wikipedia].

It is also located in one of the most geologically interesting places on earth—at least from a subterranean standpoint—as the nation of Georgia also contains the world's deepest known cave.

As National Geographic explained in an article several years ago, Krubera Cave—also known as Voronya—is still incompletely explored, despite its record-breaking, abyssal depths; expeditions have spent more than three weeks underground there, mapping windows and chambers, sleeping in tents, and using colored dyes to trace rivers and streams locked in the rock walls around them.

Check out this sequence of images, for instance, documenting an organized descent into the planet—or this article about caving in Abkhazia, or even this summary of the "Call of the Abyss" exploration project that sought to find the true depths of Voronya Cave.

[Images: Vardzia, as seen in some stunning photos by cosh_to_jest].

In any case, there's absolutely no geological connection between Vardzia and Krubera Cave—there is no secret tunnel system linking the two across the vast Georgian landscape (after all, they are extremely far apart)—but how exciting would it be to discover that Vardzia had, in fact, been constructed as a kind of architectural filter above the stovepipe-like opening of a titanic cave system, and that, 800 years ago, monks alone in the mountains reading books about the end of the world might have sat there, surrounded by fading frescoes of saints and dragons, looking into the mouth of the abyss, perhaps even in their own local twist on millennial Christianity standing guard over something they believed to be hiding far below.

[Images: Vardzia, via Wikipedia].

In fact, I don't mean to belabor the point here, but I've always been fascinated by the fact that the CIA has satellite photos that have been used as scouting documents for the rumored location of Noah's Ark—it is "satellite archaeology," one researcher claims. That is, there being quite a few religious members of the U.S. government, things like Noah's Ark are considered more objective and archaeological than they are superstitious or theological.

But how absolutely mind-boggling would it be to find out someday that there is, operating within the U.S. intelligence services, a small group of especially religious analysts who have been scouring the Caucausus region, funded by tax dollars, and armed with geoscanning equipment and several miles of rope, looking for the entrance to Hell?

You can see further images of Vardzia here.

Wooden Veil rise from Berlin and are about to release their self-titled album via Dekoder. Here's their new video for the song "Red Sky".



Beautifully haunting stuff.

Kapitan, there was an accident in the research facility! It’s imperative we reach the acid baths…

I just had to share this site with you. Once again provided by my son (did I mention that he does not have enought to do?)

rolcats

According to the New York Times, there is, in Beijing, "a secret network of detention centers used to prevent aggrieved citizens from lodging complaints against the Chinese government."

[Image: "Bunk beds are seen in a room in a black jail in Beijing in August 2009," the New York Times explains. Apparently, "more than a dozen illegal detention centers known as black jails exist in Beijing." Photo by Greg Baker for the AP].

It is part of a "Byzantine network of interceptors, guards and holding pens," the article continues, "used to put off the petitioners who flock to Beijing in the hope that the authorities will resolve longstanding grievances, many of them involving official corruption in their hometowns."

Like a deleted scene—or alternate ending—from Zhang Yimou's film The Story of Qiu Ju, we read that "those grabbed off the street often have their cellphones and identification confiscated before being locked away in guesthouses or dank basements. After being held for days or weeks, inadequately fed and sometimes beaten, they are shipped back to their home provinces with the admonition that they stay away from the capital."

It's The Trial all over again. From The New York Times:

Although the right to petition the authorities is enshrined in the Constitution, that right is frequently swallowed up by the reality of contemporary China’s system of governance: local officials, facing pressure to maintain social stability, are penalized for allowing too many complainants to find their way to the offices of the central government.

This need to prevent "too many complainants" from finding their way to the center necessitates the construction and maintenance of counter-spaces—"dank basements" and other makeshift jails—as a kind of architectural buffer held up against political reform. In fact, it's more like an exact inversion of Kafka's "Great Wall of China" story, in which an imperial messenger is lost and indefinitely dislocated on a fruitless attempt to find exit from the governmental architecture all around him.

[Image: The Great Wall of China, via Wikipedia].

In that story, we see a messenger whispered something of great importance by the emperor himself; now that messenger simply has to relay his words to the proper authorities elsewhere. However, "how futile are all his efforts," Kafka writes.

He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace—but he will never win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would be achieved. He would still have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would be achieved. He would still have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally did burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—then the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment.

It is buffer space, in other words: space in the way of political communication.

By comparing the incarceration of Chinese citizens to a Kafka story, however, I don't mean to diminish the very real sense of political alarm one should feel at the existence of these "black jails" in Beijing; I do mean, on the other hand, to point out how different political philosophies spatialize themselves, enlisting architecture—here, an off-the-books architecture forming unofficial spaces of detainment—as a realization of their own sovereign philosophies. That is, certain building types befit certain political philosophies—and unacknowledged prisons are a particularly alarming example of this. Geographer Trevor Paglen's work becomes especially disturbing in this regard, as he takes us through places like Camp Delta or the unregulated networks of CIA rendition, and so on.

But I want to go back to the less than reassuring political message of The Story of Qiu Ju, mentioned earlier. The bulk of that film presents viewers with a self-possessed heroine who has stood up, once and for all, for her and her husband's rights in the face of locally corrupted bureaucrats; but her chain of unaddressed complaints leads her to pursue higher and higher levels of governmental authority, including physical trips outward through more and more distant urban spaces. She soon finds herself emotionally alone in a strange city she cannot navigate, tracking down officials by way of nonsensically over-formalized channels of communication.

And, at the end, she seems to go nowhere. It doesn't work. She lodges her complaint—and returns home.

[Image: A scene of citizenry and its government, from The Story of Qiu Ju].

But when things suddenly seem to go her way—spoiler alert—it's at exactly the wrong moment, as if she never should have started the complaint process in the first place. It's as if, the film ambiguously suggests, the very act of petitioning her government has resulted in these previously unseen layers of government coming into being, materializing out of the haze of invisible sovereignty in order to respond to her call.

She brings the government into existence, in other words, by turning to it for guidance and complaint.

This is a morally unconvincing position to take, especially in a nation like China—but it comes with architectural implications, and these are also relevant here. For instance, would these "black jails" and political holding-rooms need to exist, we might ask in this highly specific context, if rural petitioners would simply stop coming to the city in protest? Perhaps not—but 1) this is all the more reason for such petitioners to visit the capital in record numbers, thus forcing, through sheer spatial absurdity, political change and requiring that their grievances be heard, and 2) it says volumes about any political system if its government would hold the very people who come to it for guidance inside an addressless world of dorm rooms, "dank basements," secret detention centers, and cots, officially unrecognized except for the time it takes to overlook them.

It would make for a fantastic study: how do governments spatially realize themselves? Is democracy possibility in a nation built for authoritarian control—and vice versa: can true authoritarianism ever be achieved in a space designed against these sorts of peripheral—and easily denied—incarcerations?

Could we reverse-Haussmannize entire nations to make repression a spatial impossibility?

It was all about the pie this morning. This was my third consecutive run at the Fort Collins Thanksgiving Day race and in the first two years I had failed to pull off an age group top three, missing out on the age-group pies. This year I was determined to bring something extra to the Thanksgiving table.

Based on my recent run at Dublin, Mr. Mcmillan seemed to think I was in sub 22 shape, so 5:30s were the goal.

Got out for a three mile warm-up with Frank Antonelli and was back to the start area in time to play official photographer for Alistair's big race, which was a third of a mile from Oak & Mason, up to Mountain and then around to the finish on College.

We got to the start just as the gun went off, so Alistair (and Dana) had their work cut out for them from the get go. Undeterred, Alistair put in a strong run, munching up the competition as he went, finishing with a strong kick. We've been chatting with Alistair all week about the race, so he was pretty psyched to finally be running. He was a proud little chappy as he crossed the finish line, although I'm pretty sure he prefers trails.

The race proper was five minutes after the kids' run, so I quickly stripped down and headed over to the start. According to the PA, close to 4,000 people were registered for the race (3,400 finished), which is huge for Fort Collins. And not only is the Thanksgiving Day field the biggest of the year in town, but it is also by far the most competitive with lots of ringers from out of town racing for a prize purse of $5,000.


Chatted with Steve Cathcart and Pete Stevenson at the start - about three deep - and got some form on the elite field. Nuta Olaru, Alisha Williams and Nicole Feest seemed like favorites in the women's field, while I can't say I recognized too many of the names Steve threw at me from the men's field. Turns out the speedsters were there in full force. In all, twelve guys would run sub-5:00 minute miles to finish under 20 minutes.

I was determined to go out at a sensible pace today as I have a terrible habit of gunning it from the start in shorter races, when the best strategy - for me - is to work up to my racing pace rather than working back to it. Far less stressful aerobically, and it so much better to be accelerating through the opening minutes than slowing through them.

Having learned at Dublin that elite women make good pacers, I settled in behind the lead pack of five ladies through the first mile (5:22), which felt pretty comfortable, and then coming to the turn into City Park just before the two mile I edged ahead of the lead ladies and settled into a good rhythm. I was running solo here with a large pack close behind and a sprinkling of guys within reach ahead. Second mile came in at 5:34, or 4 seconds up on the goal. I was still feeling good so kept the effort right there.


Coming down Mountain Ave. I could hear the pitter-patter of the women's race behind me, all the while getting updates from spectators as they cheered the lead action on. I picked up Frank pretty close to mile three, which split at 5:24 (16:22), and felt the girls getting closer. I knew they'd be kicking it in soon, as money was at stake, so I was debating internally if I wanted to be childish and try to out-kick them if it came down to it or take the more dignified approach and let them get on with it.

By Mason Road, maybe a quarter mile from the finish, Romanian Olympic marathoner Nuta Olaru made her move. It was pretty weak to be honest, but it was enough to get by me and also to string out the other two girls with five meters between first and third. Rounding the last turn onto College, I decided to accept my second chicking of the year and cruised to the finish. While I probably wouldn't have beaten the winner across the line anyway, I did have the fourth place woman sprint by me in the last ten meters. Doh.


My last mile was a 5:42, but the general consensus among GPS-carrying runners after the race was that mile three was slightly short and mile four slightly long, so those splits were probably more like 5:30 and 5:36, which means I ran a very evenly paced race.

It was definitely fun to get the pole position on the women's race, which was an absolute barn-burner. Adriana Nelson caught and out-kicked Olaru for the win, Olaru and Alisha Williams finished one second behind the winner in a photo finish and Nicole Feest was a second behind them. Phew! The winning time in the men's race was 18:52 by a guy from Alamosa called Aucencio Martinez - fast.

I finished two seconds over my goal in 22:02, which last year would have been good enough for pie, but with far more runners this year I had a feeling when I crossed the line that pie might be eluding me once again. I got to Old Chicago just at they were sticking the preliminary results on the window.

Second, 35-39! Ah, yes, the pie was mine.

Gold—the price of which has nearly quadrupled over the past decade—is now being purchased (and hoarded) on such a massive scale that the vaults of New York City have run out of space to store it all in.

[Image: Stackin' it at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City].

The Wall Street Journal reports this week that "fleets of armored trucks piled with gold bars and coins have been streaming out of midtown Manhattan" in a mass movement, perhaps geologically comparable to a landslide, of financialized minerals.

HSBC has apparently "issued an edict that it wanted retail investors to remove their bullion to make space for big institutional customers," The First Post adds, and so "owners of vaults and warehouses across the United States have had to jump to action." However, removing gold from the basements of New York City is "easier said than done," they add—especially as it requires "something approaching a military operation" to get these huge quantities of extraordinarily valuable metal off the island.

The headline sums it up: "Armored trucks leave NYC 'loaded with gold'."

"I have never seen any relocation like this," says the managing director of FideliTrade. Except, of course, in Die Hard with a Vengeance...

[Image: The solid gold walls of the U.S. Bullion Depository at Ft. Knox].

In fact, some massive new gold heist film should now be forced into production, set in the over-securitized labyrinth of vaults beneath a skyscraper in midtown, a kind of post-Italian-Job-remake example of urban super-thievery, complete with glimpses of the complicated overlapping spatial histories of an earlier island geography, from New York's forgotten underground rivers (which our criminals could perhaps scuba-dive through) to inexplicable brick walls (bumped up against where the robbers' maps only show mud). A small baroque pavilion in Central Park could be involved, or perhaps huge rooms of subsurface shelving deep beneath the New York Public Library where CGI-friendly radar equipment could be tested by our future perpetrators.

(Original gold story spotted by Steve Silberman).

The awesome futuists from Helsinki are here with a new video. This might be the most seriously raddest boogie banging music video released in Finland this year, with exploding hot dogs and lazer shooting eagles flying around. The song is definitely one of the best by the duo.



The dudes have also a new album called "TUM TUM TUM" out via Gaea Records.

“Recent days, months, weeks, year(s) have been a good time for music… at least, they have been to me. Over the past year to year and a half, I’ve discovered so much incredibly epic, gorgeous, utterly mind-blowing music, that it’s been hard to keep up with. I don’t want to go too far into detail concerning each and every track on this mix, but these are some musicians, peers, projects, and tracks that have really stuck out to me this year. There’s an aesthetic that flows through this music; it’s grainy, it’s reactionary, it’s radiant, it’s intelligent, it’s haunting, and it packs this intense vibe that you can’t help but take notice to. I won’t keep throwing cliché adjectives around, I’ll simply let this wonderful music speak for itself… Here’s some of my favorite music of recent days, months, weeks, year(s)…”

- Pink Priest, November 2009.

 

Here's a new, amazing mix tape by Pink Priest. I'll as well simply let this wonderful music speak for itself.



We Sleep In This Cave | A Mixtape by Pink Priest



Via Discontent.

You've heard the song, now here's the video. This is pretty rad stuff and it continues the visual thing that was started last week.

Exercise in minimalistic graphic design.

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