Of course, it’s probably only insomnia. Many must have it.
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in this house you will never die \/\/ heavenly architecture 2
In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard points out that they are as willing to die as we are to live. They are terrorists. We are the consumer capitalist global order. Baudrillard sees a disturbing manifestation of a trend of consumer culture he first observed in Symbolic Exchange and Death more than thirty years before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center: that slavery functions by way of a prohibition against death, and of all the social taboos produced by ‘global’ culture in the later half of the 20th century, such a prohibition – a prohibition on death, against a person’s moral right to die – is the most widespread. It is the slave owner, the master, who can die. The slave cannot die. Captured in war, the slave’s life is transferred to an infinite debt. He lives on credit; his death becomes the most immoral act possible, because it constitutes a failure to amend the debt accrued when his life was spared by his master. When we see suicidal terrorism on TV, our reaction to it is one of moral indignation. Of course, there is the outward violence of the event, the civilian casualties, the destruction, the reality [...]
the cherubs are not what they seem \/\/ heavenly architecture 1
The West, meaning Europe, was a really crappy place to live for the millennia-and-a-half (roughly) between the fall of the Romans and the Renaissance, especially when you compare the state of European life during the dark ages to the life elsewhere on the planet. Architecturally (again roughly), it was all about churches and castles. Churches and monastic centers meant to solidify and eternalize the dominance of the Christian religion, and served as the infrastructural hardware requisite to homogenize European identity generally in a time of feudal competition between insular communities. Defensive castles, rarer than churches (though no less important), served to ensure that the rich people didn’t get killed every time a barbarian horde decided to invade. The contemplative and stoical Romanesque, coupled with intellectual, geometry-obsessed Byzantine architecture, piggybacking on religion and utilizing a more or less standard cannon of rules concerning construction and design, provided a stylistic unity for Europe roughly until the dawn of the 2nd millennia. The Gothic mode intensified the brooding, introspective aspect of European architecture, until the relative opulence of the Renaissance resuscitated a certain levity and exhibitionist confidence in European structures. The idea is that when life sucks it becomes all [...]
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