baby

Judicial systems retain the core of what was useful in monarchy.  There's more than historical accident to our calling it a court.

seep

International travel, particularly to Luxembourg, a financial haven - I mean, center - makes one think anew about money.  One of my themes is that money, as such (that is, taken apart from value), is not an abstraction, but is abstraction.  Put differently, money is fluid value or the fluidity of fluidity.

Over here, my credit card company knows I am abroad, and keeps asking for verification.  The local acceptance company knows my card is foreign, and controls from its end is obvious.  But then I spend cash and there is: nothing.  Currency oozes through the frozen, viscous structures.

holidays

Human nature abhors a vacuum.

Magdalene

There is beauty in brokenness.

glories

The cruel beauty of "Bali Ha'i" of Rodgers and Hammerstein from South Pacific, both lyrics and music - the truth of early middle age told.

hollow walls

Some facts continue to surprise after they are known - even after they are commonplace.  The surprise of early nightfall after the time changes is the paradigm.  Or the anatomical shape of the tongue - that it is large, deep and mushroom like, rather than a flat surfboard-shaped extension.

yellow

The impression I get from old films and pictures is that the public use of yellow to caution or emphasize (as with school buses, taxicabs, street signs and wet floor cones) has shifted, over the years, moving from a relatively orange tone to pale fluorescence today.  What might account for that?

"the trick is not minding that it hurts"

Lawrence of Arabia rides on iron ribbons of design.  Take the script.  Nearly every word of the dialogue has an identifiable purpose either in propelling the story or exhibiting character.  Four hours adds up to a lot of words, but minute by minute, the dialogue is spare, elegant, heightened.  If words were shot the way a scene is shot, so these words would be.  The effect on a first time viewer reaches a break through at the first dangerous confrontation: the well.  Sherif Ali confronts Lawrence.  The words are few: "Are you afraid, English?", "A man's fears are his own.", "Truly."  I once had someone sitting next to me, who was seeing Lawrence for the first time, lean and say "Why are they talking that way?" - but not for long.  Once tuned to this channel of expression, the listener experiences why, even if he does not realize it.  Because it pierces deep.  Because it is clean.  Indeed, what is cleanest about the desert - which doesn't look it but is praised as such by Lawrence - is the expression.

wave matter

As quantity has a quality all its own, so too does process have substance of itself.

publico

Being a lawyer can be just a job.  But it shouldn't be.  And I don't want that job.  I want to be a member of a profession.  One that serves principles - equal justice under the rule of law - and one that serves others: clients that pay and client's that can't.

the grid

Everything is structured.  I never hunted before I lived in the city, and now that I do, hunting is even more distant to me.  (A few squirrels shot when I was a kid don't count.)

And yet it is there - not just the hunting, but the whole infrastructure supporting it.  You go to my grandmother's rural land, out where she grew up, and her neighbors have deer in the bed of the pickup truck, two pairs of antlers, cubed venison in the chest freezer, gear, clothes, schedules, ways.  That's one layer.  Then you talk to them and you realize there are game wardens, whole social interactions with outsiders coming in to hunt, welcome or unwelcome, permits, confrontations, conventions.  A culture of hunting.

None of this is a surprise when you stop to think of it.  But one doesn't stop to think of it.  There is more than we know, right inside.

steeple

Strange to go back to South Carolina and see that the more successful churches tend towards new buildings that resemble cinemas, or gyms, or even warehouses.

Perhaps this is about money - the most space per dollar - and perhaps about flexibility, too - a simple enclosed volume can accommodate most anything.  And perhaps in some cases this is a religious decision either to eschew ornament or to reserve money for greater perceived needs.

Perhaps, perhaps, and yet it remains strange, and I think a mistake.  A space that looks like a warehouse will feel like a warehouse.  Place me in a lofty cathedral and I will look up.  Put me in a warehouse and I will go hunting for the coffee pot and non-dairy creamer.

The old standard design for baptist churches - pedimented and pillared portico, classical gabled-box proportions - was a relatively economic way to make the building impressive and also harkened back to antiquity.  Supposedly Spurgeon popularized the look on the argument that this was a good thing.  And it probably was.  And probably a baptist church will not want to ape Roman (or Eastern) catholic styles (although they might learn a thing or ten).

It can be done right.  The contemporary interior of Daniel Chapel at Furman University works well, as an inspiring space that palpably belongs to its sect, its time - and to God.  Plenty of other modern spaces work beautifully.  This agnostic would advise Christians to build to awe, if they can afford it.  And if they can't?  At least dignity.  And splendidly spiritual music fills as space with a sense of awe very inexpensively indeed.

smile

Happiness, considered as bliss, works similarly to eternity and cleaves along the same line.  Happiness, considered as an experience, is rather more indirect, in that it is a form of indirection, and in so being, distinguishes itself from pleasure.