So what is the truth about the disappearance of the railings that were standard issue for (at least) late Victorian and Edwardian housing? I’ll post here a few images of those stubs of metal that prick our memories on top of countless garden walls. We hear that they were commandeered during WW1 to make munitions …
Author archives: pasdelasbas
Chesterfield Spire
There is no finer spire than that of Chesterfield Church. It is the result of a mistake of course but is the finest piece of Gaudi architecture north of Barcelona. Walter Benjamin was concerned with ‘aura’ and the impossibility of meaning remaining constant across time. The ‘aura’ of this spire is maintained by it being …
desire…
Zizek’s definition of an obsessional neurotic (himself included) is someone whose object of desire is the other’s desire. So I do recall a very intimate moment in which a friend told me that he had been drawn into the eyes of a woman, he had seen in her a great beauty which was not an …
canonisation by drip feed
Sorry if this is mean but I find it annoying that so much is made of the death of David Frost. It’s not that I have anything against the man but for people who spent their lives on the screen why give them more screen time when they die? The broadcasting world is incestuous, one …
our friends the iconoclasts
Fascinating programme on Beyond Belief about new developments in Mecca and Medina. I was talking the other day with my friends Afif and Nawal and we were looking at pictures of Mecca. They were showing me pictures of the crowds of pilgrims around the Kabba and in the background you could see incredibly tall skyscrapers …
Greeks and Bhuddism
The children have been reading, no, devouring, the Percy Jackson books. The central theme of these is that there are in this world ‘real’ Greek Gods and more particularly their children, demi-Gods, who inhabit both the normal mundane world and the super-powered world of the Gods. Now being a lover of Greek myths I found …
Saddleworth, Brass, Morris and Rushes
Today, Saturday, we went to Greenfield, one of the Saddleworth villages. Our friends there are married and both come from the villages and we visited them on the occasion of the Saddleworth Rushcart. I won’t go into that suffice to say that a large group of Morris men process and dance around the various villages …
Darwin
Darwin’s theory of evolution developed the first unifying theory offering to explain all aspects of human life with no attention paid to cultural or other social differences. Darwin’s theory allowed us from the West who understood it (perhaps) to suggest that there was an evolutionary route that took us back to shared ancestry perhaps …
Heritage
So heritage shows emerged as a property transaction. And it remains effectively a property transaction today. Heritage is mapped by ‘heritopography’, the sets of lines of communication or cultural understanding which allow the outsider to feel in place where ever they are provided they have a guidebook all mobile device. The British tourist standing on …
History
We have all obsession with history in the Western world from whence I emerge. A compulsive interest in the past and an ability to produce that past as historical record and to consume such records. There are psycho analytical events taking place. This fascination with the past and is perhaps linked into the continual need …