№ 821. The Odyssey

rahalarts

 

№ 790. Lens Culture

Vladimir Khorev

Vladimir Khorev

№ 752. Red

 

 

№ 722. End Game: Retirement

Tanseco

But of course, retirement is only common in the middle class in the Philippines, where you’d need at least P5 million to live comfortably in retirement. Most Filipinos work until old age, but big family units make it easier to pull back from working in your later years.

Big 7 Travel ranked its Best Places to Retire list based on a number of factors, namely: quality of life, cost of living, rent index, restaurant price index, average annual temperatures, the easiness of obtaining a visa or residency, healthcare, hospitality, language barriers, and the range of things to do.

The Philippines, surprisingly, ranked higher than Luxembourg, Ireland, and New Zealand. Meanwhile, the best countries to retire in are Slovenia, Portugal, Estonia, Spain, and Paraguay. But you won’t have to fly halfway across the world for a cozy retirement community when you can find it right here in the Philippines.

№ 673. Space Invaders

 

Space Invaders - Ravenna, Italy

Space Invaders - Perth, Australia

№ 671. John Kuhn Glass

 

№ 649. Hong Kong

Exploring the bustling Central business district of Hong Kong on foot can be quite the challenge.
The area's hilly landscape, combined with subtropical heat and smothering humidity, would test the stamina of a mountaineer.

Luckily, there's the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator -- an 800-meter-long chain of moving stairs and walkways that's been dubbed the world's longest outdoor escalator system.

Opened to the public in 1993 and built at a cost of $30 million, it's a series of 16 reversible escalators and three travelators -- all covered to protect against sudden downpours.
Building a system of people movers that intersects 13 busy streets on a slope was as challenging a task as one would expect.
 

The escalators were designed to follow the natural inclination of the hill slope. As most of the slopes' gradients don't fall within the normal standards for escalators, a dedicated production line was set up by the escalator manufacturer.
 

With limited spaces between Hong Kong's old buildings and new skyscrapers, most of the escalators on the link only have one reversible track that changes direction "following the prevailing direction of pedestrian flow during the day."
 

Running at around 0.65 meters per second, the network of escalators has its own CCTV system with 75 cameras, a PA system with 200 speakers, four LED displays and a control room to monitor the system.
But most importantly, it's a congestion-free means of commuting between Central and Conduit Road in Mid-Levels, serving 78,000 pedestrian trips daily. And there's no charge.
 

Snaking through narrow streets in the busiest neighborhood in town, it's actually a great way to tour Hong Kong's dramatic cityscape -- from dai pai dong food stalls in small alleys to the trendiest bars in Mid-Levels, from colorful old walk-ups to sleek modern skyscrapers.
 

Here are some highlights that can be found by hopping on and off the escalator system.

№ 627. Leonardo da Vinci

Vitruvian Man

 

Kenneth Clark, who remains the best commentator on Leonardo, wrote years ago that Leonardo’s great artistic gift was for making emblematic images from observed life, hieroglyphic symbols that have the haunting quality of the real, constantly renegotiating the line “between science and symbolism.” Leonardo’s most “documentary” drawings, like the famous cross-section of the child wrapped in its mother’s womb, are largely imaginary: he never dissected a pregnant woman, and, anyway, the uterus he drew showed the multiple placenta of a cow. When he turned his mind fully to an image, it nearly always was both mythic and momentary. The “Mona Lisa,” of course, is the most famous of these double images, ageless femme fatale and Florentine merchant’s wife. But the gift, uncannily, is visible in everything he does.

The famous figure of Vitruvian man, for instance, splayed out in his encircled square, is in origin a derivative illustration of an antique idea about regular proportions: a man’s proportions when the arms are horizontal make a square; with the arms diagonal they center a circle. Though it is possible to see this as a “humanist” ideal, it is not necessarily so; it says not that man’s proportions are divine but merely that they are regular. The point of the image is not that man is the measure of all things; it is that man can, like all things, be measured. But the tension between this abstract and diminishing idea and its realization as a strange, aged, specific figure, with a strong, unostentatious but perfect body and a grave, unforgettable face—half Don Imus, half St. Jerome; Nicholl suggests that it is a self-portrait—gives the image a certain heroism, as though the individual had stoically lent himself for a scientific trial.

 

№ 625. Leeroy New: Mebuyan's Colony

 

№ 613. Can't Help Myself

"No piece of art has ever emotionally affected me the way this robot arm piece has. It's programmed to try to contain the hydraulic fluid that’s constantly leaking out and required to keep itself running...if too much escapes, it will die so it's desperately trying to pull it back to continue to fight for another day. Saddest part is they gave the robot the ability to do these 'happy dances' to spectators. When the project was first launched it danced around spending most of its time interacting with the crowd since it could quickly pull back the small spillage. Many years later... (as you see it now in the video) it looks tired and hopeless as there isn't enough time to dance anymore.. It now only has enough time to try to keep itself alive as the amount of leaked hydraulic fluid became unmanageable as the spill grew over time. Living its last days in a never-ending cycle between sustaining life and simultaneously bleeding out... (Figuratively and literally as its hydraulic fluid was purposefully made to look like it's actual blood).

"The robot arm finally ran out of hydraulic fluid in 2019, slowly came to a halt and died - And I am now tearing up over a friggin robot arm.

Kalie Kismet

№ 606. Headspace

 

№ 600. Simbang Gabi

Simbang Gabi, Oil on Canvas by Cesar Buenaventura (Filipino, 1922–1983)

№ 592. Christopher Marley

 

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№ 508. The Paradoxes of Enclosure

At a time when the rule of life across the globe has been disrupted by the paradoxes of collective isolation, a sensitivity to “the small,” to containment and enclosure, presses upon individuals, families, and society in unexpected and often confounding ways. Like Jones’s experimental letter forms, we awkwardly jostle for space within the confines of our homes, balconies, and gardens. Even communal spaces like parks and grocery stores seem to have shrunk, as attempts to heed social distancing alter our awareness of space. Our sense of what counts as crowded has changed, as we learn to accommodate these new rules. Meanwhile, many of us, particularly those in self-isolation, are simultaneously learning just how vastly vacant even a small space can feel.

We can recalibrate our senses to the mysteries of the small through meditation on that paradox of paradoxes, the Incarnation, with the help of this little wood block by David Jones. Throughout Jones’s work there is a marked affection for “things familiar and small.” It is inseparable from a spiritual practice of attention—tuning our senses to that which is easily overlooked or undervalued. Wrapped up in this sensitivity to the small is a care for the fragile, the vulnerable, and a discovery of the surprising resilience of the delicate. It is guided above all by the conviction that it is through refinement of our attention that the wonder and mystery of the created world, particularly in its relation to the divine, reveals itself most fully to us. Focusing on what is small and seemingly commonplace becomes a portal for seeing all things in light of the love of God and thus yields, paradoxically, the most generous and capacious of vantage points.

As the whole world fights to contain a contagion through the mantra “stay at home,” uniting and separating lives in various ways, our spiritual labor in this time may be to find these openings for grace within the multiple circles of our everyday circumstance as these widen and intersect with others, and in light of their relation to the divine Other. We are in truth, as Julian of Norwich reminds us, enclosed not by walls or government guidelines, but by the enduring intimacy of the love of God. For “he is our clothing that for love wrappeth us and windeth us, holdeth us and all becloseth us, hangeth about us for tender love that he may never leave us.”

Grand Mosque at Djenne, Mali

№ 479. Blue-Eyed Wisdom

Parallels between Chaplin and Adolf Hitler had been widely noted: the pair were born four days apart, both had risen from poverty to world prominence, and Hitler wore the same toothbrush moustache as Chaplin. It was this physical resemblance that supplied the plot for Chaplin's next film, The Great Dictator, which directly satirised Hitler and attacked fascism.




 Bento Box

1. Charlie Chaplin had piercing blue eyes.
2. He entered a Charlie Chaplin look alike contest and lost.
3. Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, edited, starred in, and composed the music for most of his films.

№ 404. "Take your broken heart, make it into art."

Here's a middle of the week advice: for the laborers who are tired, knee-deep in life's muck; for the aging bureaucrats who are swamped with public summonses and scorn; for the toil of vocation in anonymity, without fanfare and without noise:  "Take your broken heart, make it into art."

"Thank you, Hollywood foreign press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said. You and all of us in this room, really, belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it. Hollywood, foreigners, and the press. But who are we? And, you know, what is Hollywood anyway? It's just a bunch of people from other places.

I was born and raised and created in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola [Davis] was born in a sharecropper's cabin in South Carolina, and grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sarah Paulson was raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Italy. Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Ethiopia, raised in -- no, in Ireland, I do believe. And she's here nominated for playing a small town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, is here for playing an Indian raised in Tasmania.

№ 395. Literature and Politics

“The place for literature is built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile place in some ways, but an indestructible one. When it’s broken, we rebuild it. Because we need shelter.” --- Arundhati Roy

Student art from paper cranes at the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial

№ 389. V for Vicissitudes 1

Life, running on quicksilver,
Frozen by light etched
On paper and ink.

№ 325. Escher Tuesday

They called off work. Its typhoon Tuesday. After getting up 530 am and haling, Uber quickly for work, passing flooded streets, I learned that SC twitted the suspension order. No work. I stayed in the office until nine and just browsed the web and waited for the rain to die down.

Here's what I came across:

№ 319. Urban Sketches

Time & Tide

"Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last."