Forever A Fangirl

Updated! (01.19.10) AVATAR - Movie Premiere - Promo Preview - UHQ Screen Shots*

tvguide
This is sort of interesting. A couple months back, "Avatar" was being panned as being dead on arrival. I sort of stopped paying attention to it and not until today realized that not only has the critical response done a complete 180, but that it seems it did so for a valid reason: the movie is unique and appears to be at the forefront of yet another phase of 'new filmmaking'. It's intrigued me and knowing that Sigourney Weaver has two roles in it helps a lot in deciding to give the film a shot. It could be great. I hope so!

'We talk to stars Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver. And Director James Cameron says he hopes people see the emotional storyline behind the movie's effects and action sequences. Get a front row seat to the most anticipated fantasy flick of the year, AVATAR! Big Movie Guide takes you behind the scenes of the film, checking out the cutting edge technology, talking to the stars and hanging out at the premiere!'

Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn’t exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor’s physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI). Until now, by far the most plausible character created in this manner has been slithery Gollum from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” cycle. The exotic creatures in “Avatar,” which include an astonishment of undulating, flying, twitching and galloping organisms, don’t just crawl through the underbrush; they thunder and shriek, yip and hiss, pointy teeth gleaming.

The most important of these are the Na’vi, and while their movements can bring to mind old-fashioned stop-motion animation, their faces are a triumph of tech innovation, with tremors and twitches that make them immediately appealing and empathetic. By the time Neytiri ushers Jake into her world of wonders — a lush dreamscape filled with kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent flora and fauna, with pink jellyfishlike creatures that hang in the air and pleated orange flowers that snap shut like parasols — you are deep in the Na’vi-land. It’s a world that looks as if it had been created by someone who’s watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau television or, like Mr. Cameron, done a lot of diving. It’s also familiar because, like John Smith in “The New World,” Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas story, Jake has discovered Eden.

NYTimes Critics Pick

UPDATE 01.19.10

D.C. things seen

                                        

                                       

Capital Bldg., D.C.    

  ...with lovely cherry blossoms *some colour added due to-gray day/very pale pink blossoms
               

               

                                             

Cherry blossom walk

 

               

                                             

Einstein 
The trolley tour guide pointed him out.
He's in a rather obscure area at the side of the road.

            

   

               

                                             

WWII, Capital Bldg.,Washington Monument

Spouse took this one.

          

               

                                    

Great starting point for this memorial-intense area of D.C.

Union Station

            

          

               

                                       

Vietnam Women's Memorial

For the nurses near the front lines.          

            

               

                                             

     Vietnam Memorial Wall            

     Gotta go there to feel it.

               
 

               

                                    

A few Soldiers who died the first week in April (all years) Vietnam *photo by my spouse
Of all the memorials in D.C. this is the one that touches me the most.  It just seems the most personal. There are always plentiful signs (mementoes, flowers) that their families still remember, still care. And one is encouraged to touch it--to feel it (and sometimes take a pencil and paper and take am inverse stencil print of a soldier's name from it).
I dunno. It makes me cry each time I've seen it. The only one that comes close is Lincoln.

               

                                     WWII Memorial detail
If only... The most impressive thing to me about this memorial are the quotations throughout. Sadly, the rest of it is not really memorable. It seems to lack cohesion and to be blunt, looks cheap and pedestrian. A shame, really. It could have been so much more.

            

               

                                        

The National Archives

 

               

                                    National National Archives Frieze

Detail of frieze

   

                

                                  

Korean War Memorial 
My favourite memorial after Lincoln & Vietnam and I knew no one in that war. This memorial kicks ass, tho'. It's powerful and beautiful. One feels as if she is _right there_ with them.            

          

Trying for more detail by using high contrast. 

               

                                   Union Station ceiling detail   

               

                                  

  Lincoln Memorial "basement"

  Don't forget to click to enlarge.         

    

       

               

                                             

    

Lincoln Memorial

The Great Emancipator. He just was refurbished (cleaned). I've not ever seen him so white. Looking spiffy, Abe.         

   

Balboa Park

Although we had little time and therefore missed most of the insides of the museums, here's two takes on Balboa Park. Enjoy. A cactus flower colourized and reflective tool used. I thought it looked sort of tribal.

Balboa Park, SanDiego, Ca.

Project Rebirth

QUOTATION OF THE DAY (from NYTimes.com)

"These kids can't walk from their middle school to the deli to buy a Snapple without seeing 15 references to Sept. 11: the signs in stores, the bumper stickers. And when they're in line to buy that Snapple, there's the whisperers. They can't escape it."
CHRIS BURKE , founder a group that serves families of the victims of Sept. 11.

The view from the graveyard behind St. Paul's Church, taken in spring 2004.

I can't speak to the grief of so many, especially the children of September 11, 2001 victims. Though I feel deep pity for them, their emotions are unique and impossible for me to fathom.
Instead I'll share with you a new website Project Rebirth, which shows from a multitude of angles, on-going time-lapse photography of the construction taking place where the World Trade center once stood. They've put together a mini- movie which is quite good and, according to the people behind the project, the real-time video-taping will continue for ten years (the anticiapated length of the construction project).

Source

Gotham, the typeface chosen for the Freedom Tower cornerstone at the World Trade Center site, is distinguished by the uniformity in the width of its strokes and the absence of embellishments like serifs.

A view of ground zero from the Project Rebirth time-lapse camera 47 stories up on the American Express Building, at the northwest corner of the site, taken in autumn 2003.

A vision of what the future may look like.

By SARAH BOXER

Published: September 8, 2004

In the fall of 2001 when the dust and ash from the World Trade Center were still in the air, Jim Whitaker, a documentary filmmaker, decided to photograph everything happening at ground zero. By the spring of 2002 three cameras were pointed at the pit, each taking one shot every five minutes, round the clock. Months later, three more cameras were added.

That was the beginning of Project Rebirth, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a historical record of the rebuilding.

Today www.projectrebirth.org, a Web site produced with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and AOL , opens for public viewing. The site includes links to the architects who are building at ground zero; profiles of 10 people whose lives were altered by Sept. 11; an interview with Kevin Rampe, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation; the view from a live Web camera at the site; and a timeline that you can click on to watch short movies of milestone events there.

But the main attraction is the time-lapse photography, showing (on a very tiny screen, 3½ inches by 2½ inches) what the six cameras have been seeing all along. Each camera has a distinctive view and a different reason for being there.

 

 

 

 

 

One camera, on the roof of 30 Vesey Street, at the corner of Church Street, gives a wide view down from the northeast corner of ground zero. The weather comes right at the camera: rain, mist and snow. And the shadows from the buildings nearby often upstage the activity in the pit.

 

Another camera is 47 stories up, in the American Express Building at 3 World Financial Center at the northwest corner of the site. It "has an omniscience to it," Mr. Whitaker, the director of Project Rebirth, said.

So far this camera has provided the most complete view. You can watch the PATH station going up: the girders, the tracks, the first layer, the second layer. And when the Freedom Tower starts to rise, Mr. Whitaker promised, it will look as if the new building were heading right for the camera. As the tower ascends above the lens, the camera will tilt up to watch.

The camera on the roof of 115 Broadway, the current home of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is at the southeast corner of ground zero. Because you can see the building's old stone parapets, the pictures from this camera have a nostalgic feel. The snow accumulates and melts on the stonework while the construction unfolds beyond it.

But the grandest view comes from the southwest corner. Here a Vista Vision camera, the very camera that Cecil B. DeMille used to film "The Ten Commandments," is perched on the ninth floor of the Dow Jones Building, where there is a memorial for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter abducted and killed in Pakistan in the aftermath of Sept. 11. The picture is crisp and very wide. "You see New York life passing by, cruising by," Mr. Whitaker said. The shots hum with traffic and cloud drift.

That covers the four corners of the site. What was missing, said Thomas Lappin, the director of photography for Project Rebirth, was a camera at ground level to show "the human scale." So a camera was planted 18 inches off the ground in the graveyard behind St. Paul's Church. Its pictures are filled with tombstones, trees and sky.

"It's a little reprieve from the full site, the big wound," Mr. Lappin said.

Another close-up camera was installed on the roof of the firehouse that was closest to the World Trade Center: Engine 10, Ladder 10. Nicknamed "1010," the camera is there partly for symbolic purposes, Mr. Whitaker said, to represent the "heroism of the firehouse." It also shows details well: girders going up, cranes turning crazily round and round and a flag flapping in the foreground.

That same firehouse perch is now also being shared by a digital Webcam that has just been installed.

Originally, Mr. Whitaker said, he planned to photograph at ground zero for seven years, but now he thinks he will keep the cameras running for at least 10, at a cost of some $8 million (and this is with the film being donated by Kodak and the processing by Deluxe). He said he was hoping that Project Rebirth would be one of the institutions represented at the World Trade Center site. If it is, he wants to install six screens in one room so that viewers can see the whole building process from all six angles over the course of 20 minutes.

If not, though, no shot will be lost. Mr. Whitaker, the president of Imagine Entertainment, the movie production company founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, plans to make a documentary with the time-lapse footage. (You can watch a trailer of the movie at the Web site.) And eventually everything that the six cameras have seen, millions of feet of film, he said, will go to the Library of Congress.

At first Mr. Whitaker approached ground zero with dread and anxiety, he said. But when he saw the pile of rubble visibly diminish in a matter of days, he started feeling more optimistic. He wanted to capture that feeling, he said, and the speed with which the cleanup was taking place. Time-lapse photography was the ticket.

What is most striking now from the time-lapse view, though, is just how slow the rebuilding has been. The days, the weeks, the snow, the rain, the shadows, the day, the night, the traffic, the seasons all pass. Meanwhile the pit remains. It is the most stable thing in the pictures. And that is the view that has been edited for the Web site. The unedited dailies, Mr. Lappin said, are "incredibly repetitive."

There's No Glass In The Oculus

I must admit--the picture grabbed me--but the first person narrative about one facet of the Pantheon in Rome is well worth reading. Makes me ache to go to Europe. :sigh:

SOURCE

A Monument's Minder
By ELIN SCHOEN BROCKMAN

IT'S a chilly May evening, I'm alone in Rome and I've come to the Pantheon to comfort myself, to bask in the positività, as they say in Italy. Hundreds of other people mill around the echoing rotunda, stopping to pay respects at the tombs of King Vittorio Emanuele II, King Umberto I, Queen Margherita di Savoia and Raphael, "the prince of painters," but mostly staring up, way up, to marvel at the vastness of the dome and watch the disk of fading daylight visible through its wide-open oculus.

Suddenly a small woman with short, copper-colored hair zips through the crowd and disappears into an alcove next to the main altar. Seconds later the lights go out. A bell rings. The copper-haired woman reappears. "Prego," she says loudly and clearly, urging the crowd toward the great doors. "Prego, si chiude," closing time, everyone out.

I follow her, fascinated. I want to meet her. I've had an epiphany. The Big Questions that the Pantheon always inspires (for instance, how it's managed to survive in its present form for nearly 1,900 years of fires, earthquakes, lightning, floods and barbarians, not to mention Pope Urban VIII's renewal projects) have given way to smaller yet still pressing concerns, beginning with: Who cleans up in here? What does it take to help this precious monument survive all these people (3.5 million visitors a year, it turns out)?

I catch up with the woman, ask if she has worked here long. "Twenty-four years," she says, smiling, "but not this weekend." If I come by Monday morning we can talk. The earlier the better, before the crowds. "Ask for Saveria," she says. By this time we've reached the gigantic bronze doors. One is already closed. The other is closing slowly, two men pushing and shoving as though it weighed eight tons, which, I later find out, it does. I slip out. Saveria waves. The door clangs shut.

First thing Monday morning, Saveria Maruca and I sit inside the glass booth in the Pantheon's already-crowded foyer sipping cappuccino from Di Rienzo across the piazza. Or rather, I sit. She stands, poised to dart out and stop all who make the mistake of entering here with gelato, panini, animals, tripods, bicycles, skateboards or cigarettes, and anyone lying on the floor, standing on a bench, or (this really happened) climbing up a conservator's scaffold to take pictures. Visitor after visitor taps on the glass. Over and over, Saveria answers the eternal questions: No, there's no glass in the oculus; yes, it does rain in; and lots of others, some having nothing to do with the Pantheon. ("Is there a tattoo parlor nearby?")

Stonehenge Summer Solstice

Story from BBC
Revisiting Britain's biggest free festival

This Monday sees the 30th anniversary of the biggest free festival in British history.
The following BBC News Online story gives a nice thumbnail sketch of how a small gathering of hippies celebrating the summer solstice at Stonehenge evolved into the high point of the British counter-cultural calendar.

The first Stonehenge Free Festival was in 1974

Last year, more than 30,000 people gathered at Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice.
But police in Wiltshire and neighbouring Hampshire warned they would not tolerate any unlicensed "mass gatherings" after the midsummer event.
And officers were out in force to thwart any attempts to hold parties.
Andover divisional commander Superintendent Mark Chatterton said: "We are not being killjoys.
"We are all in favour of people having a good time, provided the event is properly licensed to ensure that it is safe for everyone."

Stonehenge Free Festival was never licensed and in 1985 - after being banned by English Heritage - it became so unsafe that no-one actually reached the ancient stone circle.
Phil Russell, the orphaned son of a wealthy landowner, and Jeremy Ratter, who later co-founded the anarcho-punk band Crass, staged the first Stonehenge Free Festival during the summer solstice of 1974.

Five hundred hippies climbed a barbed wire fence erected by the Ministry of Works.
And after the solstice, a hardcore of 30 defied a court injunction to stay - for another six months.
The publicity surrounding their court case ensured the attendance doubled for the solstice the following year.

Mr Ratter later recalled the 1975 festival: "Wood fires, tents and tipis, free food stalls, stages and bands, music and magic... old friends met new, hands touched, bodies entwined, minds expanded and, in one tiny spot on our Earth, love and peace had become a reality."

But the festival's co-founder was not there.
Arrested for possession of LSD the previous month, Mr Russell had been committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Released immediately after the 10-day festival, he committed suicide weeks later.
Mr Russell's ashes were scattered over the stones during the summer solstice of 1976 - by which time, the festival's attendance had again doubled.
And, fuelled by the myth of martyrdom, the numbers continued to grow at the same rate until 70,000 people attended the 10th annual Stonehenge Free Festival on 21 June 1984.

Central Library Puts on Fishnets and Hits the Disco

I find this architect intriguing in his ability to quirkily blend form and functionality into a striking-looking building. And I have a "thing"
for neat-looking and well-stocked libraries. ;) This one has the first requirement nailed.



The irregular, and seemingly arbitrary, angles and shapes of the Seattle Central Library, and its dazzling surface, don't come at the cost of functionality. Lara Swimmer/Esto

A photograph of Rem Koolhaas's new Central Library in Seattle.

By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
Published: May 16, 2004
Source

AT a dark hour, Seattle's new Central Library is a blazing chandelier to swing your dreams upon. If an American city can erect a civic project as brave as this one, the sun hasn't set on the West. In more than 30 years of writing about architecture, this is the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review. I could go on piling up superlatives like cars in a multiple collision, but take my word: there's going to be a whole lot of rubbernecking going on.

The new library, which opens next Sunday, was designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA of the Netherlands in collaboration with the Seattle firm LMN Architects. Joshua Ramus of OMA was the partner in charge. It is the centerpiece of an ambitious initiative to revamp and expand Seattle's library system citywide. This is Seattle, don't forget: a city where fortunes have been made on the premise that books, and even cities, may be rendered obsolete by digital technology. Yet this new library sets an example for cities nationwide.

Quite apart from its strengths in structure, form and space, the building exemplifies Rem Koolhaas's reliance on the architectural program: the organization of space according to use and function. Because of the clarity of this example, the Central Library's impact on architecture could be profound. It makes art out of the relationship between architect and client.

The first impression is pure bling-bling: an urban montage of starburst images without a special lens. With a faceted exterior of glass and steel, this is a big rock candy mountain of a building, twinkling in the middle of office buildings. The library occupies a full city block, bounded by Fourth and Fifth Avenues and Spring and Madison Streets. Seattle's federal courthouse is across the street. A striking Miesian office tower rises on the opposite side. It's a fantastic location.

The library's exterior is an angular composition of folded planes. Walls are of glass, supported by a diagonal grid of light blue metal that covers almost the entire surface. At first glance, the irregular angles, folds and shapes seem arbitrary. The building's structure is hard to discern, and the overall grid pattern looks like a perverse exaggeration of the abstract geometries used by mid-20th-century architects for decorative relief.

From A Mustang GT~ Illinois McMansion

It never ceases to amaze me that people will pay for a (relatively) large home situated right up next to a busy highway!

No Poetry, Passion, or Poignant Sentiment

The writer of this opinion piece draws parallels between memorializing a catastrophic event in London almost 350 years ago and what's being/been done thus far in regard to the events of September 11, 2001.
He presents an interesting, albeit possibly controversial viewpoint. (It's been my experience that Americans see themselves as unique in every way and wouldn't take kindly to NYC being compared to London. I hope readers pay attention to the last three lines of this piece--I believe it nicely highlights the writer's point.)

After Disaster, a Design for Living

By ADRIAN TINNISWOOD
NYTimes Editorials/Op-Ed
Published: March 23, 2004

BATH, England

No poetry, no passion, no poignant sentiment about reflecting absence. Just "the Monument," like The Times of London is just "The Times." As a tourist, you might have passed it by, hardly noticing, the last time you were there: a tall Doric column crowned with a gilt-bronze urn at the head of London Bridge, a few hundred yards from the Tower. It has stood for more than 300 years, reminding the curious that in 1666 one of the greatest cities in the Western world was utterly destroyed.

Our need to commemorate catastrophe runs deep. The Great Fire of London broke out early on the morning of Sunday, Sept. 2, 1666, in a bakery on Pudding Lane. Fanned by high winds and a sluggish response, the flames spread quickly through the city until night turned into day and the streets ran bright with molten lead. When the gales finally died down three days later, most of London was homeless and huddled in fields outside the city walls. Around 436 acres had burned; 13,000 houses had been destroyed; nearly $18 million had been lost at a time when that amount represented around 800 times the City of London's total annual income.

Most everyone said it was a terrorist attack: London had been firebombed by the Dutch, French Catholics, Quaker insurgents. Quakers? Everyone was wrong, although that didn't stop foreigners from being kicked in the street. It didn't stop the authorities from putting up another memorial on the site of the Pudding Lane bakery, a simple stone plaque that declared, "Here by the permission of heaven hell broke loose upon this Protestant city from the malicious hearts of barbarous Papists." It didn't prevent the prigs from moralizing or England's enemies from dancing in the streets.

On Sept. 11, 1666, Christopher Wren presented King Charles II with his vision of London. Others followed hot on his heels, until it seemed that every educated gentleman in England had his own plan for the capital. Some were pathetically simple: checkerboard grids stamped out on the old site with no feeling for tradition or topography. Others were inspired. Wren's design was magnificent, offering Londoners an array of wide avenues and axial vistas, with a new financial district, residential plazas and a Thames-side development that rivaled anything in Europe.

But none of these grand plans took any account of what ordinary Londoners wanted. So ordinary Londoners took matters into their own hands. Let the authorities argue over the big public buildings. Let the Church of England argue over which churches should be replaced, and which should be left in ruins. With no insurance, no compensation, no government help, people buckled down and rebuilt their homes and shops. They made London rise like a phoenix from the ashes. The big memorials like St. Paul's Cathedral and the City of London churches took 50 more years.

And the monument by the bridge? It came about because Parliament's post-fire legislation mandated that a column or pillar of brass or stone be put up on or near the site of the Pudding Lane bakery — "the better to preserve the memory of this dreadful visitation." In the 17th century, that was all you needed in the way of a mission statement. The memorial column, 202 feet high and 202 feet west of the site of the bakery, was just that — a memorial, not a substitute for living.

In 2004 we have this weird conviction that because the World Trade Center was such a magnificent landmark, whatever replaces it must be bigger, better, more spectacular — otherwise the terrorists will have won. And maybe we should see a dreadful visitation like 9/11 as an architectural opportunity. The architects and surveyors charged with the task of rebuilding London after the fire felt much the same.

But in 1666 ordinary traders and merchants and craftsmen just wanted to get on with the everyday business of living. They ignored the planners and visionaries. Of course there's a place for grandiose memorials; but let's not forget that in the aftermath of catastrophe there is also room for the commonplace. The real monument to the Great Fire of London is not a column with a flaming urn on top. It is London itself. In 300 years, I hope that New York, in talking of 9/11, will be able to say the same.

Adrian Tinniswood is the author of "By Permission of Heaven: The True Story of the Great Fire of London" and "His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren."

The Roads Not Taken

"Endurance Memorial" by Stuart Gosswein was one of the rejected proposals for ground zero.

The Memorial Roads Not Taken

All told, 5,201 designs were submitted to the World Trade Center memorial competition. Here is a sampling of 10 of the entries that were not chosen as finalists.

Of these ten shown, I think I like this one best. It reminds me of the Phoenix bird rising from the ashes.
I wonder if any of these designs can be incorporated elsewhere in some form? It would be a real shame to just file away all the thousands of hours of work that went into over 5000 designs.