Prisoner of Winter - Within and Without
An important announcement from Canadian media - a heralding, a warning, a portent -
The weather phenomenon La Nina will bring Canada the coldest winter in nearly 15 years, Environment Canada warned Friday.
Environment Canada’s temperature forecast shows the majority of the country will experience a “temperature anomaly” of below-normal temperatures through the months of December, January and February.
Bad news for all of you fellow Canadians out there. It has gotten so cold, so fast here. As I write this, outside the constant cloud of whirling snow continues to blur the landscape. Walking to and from work is an adventure of finding footing in high banks of snow, bundled in my thick winter jacket. As a result, it is addictive to stay indoors where you can sit, huddled in blankets and staring at the roaring snow against glass.
From inside, I watch the outside. The glass is thin, I can hear the sound of the wind, of the machines that move the snow, making room for the large monsters with their flashing lights. Inside, here, I am looking at art and marveling. Laughing, drawing inward.
Celestin, by ~oye on Deviant Art
Eric Gustafson, Prisoner
*drool* Gianni Botsford Architects, Casa Kike
By coupling indigenous techniques and materials with modern design technologies and aesthetics GBA has created this intimate double pavilion for a writer in Costa Rica.
A main studio space, with library, writing desk and grand piano, is the writer’s daytime space. The pavilion’s wooden structure, sourced from local timber, sits on a simple foundation of wooden stilts on small concrete pad foundations. Roof beams of up to 10 m long and 355 mm deep allow for an interior with no vertical columns. The mono-pitched roof elevates towards the sea shore, while the interior is through ventilated via a completely louvred glazed end façade.
Mark Gleim, A Simple Apology comic strip
—
Bob Black, revolutionary essay, “The Abolition of Work” (an excerpt):
Such is “work.” Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the “suspension of consequences.” This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that’s why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), define it as gameplaying or following rules. I respect Huizinga’s erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel—these practices aren’t rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.
No Comments Yet