Ryan McCarthy

nevver:

Liking isn’t helping

“Of course the problem is setting the goals in the first place; many enough ‘successful’ men end up drunks for having fulfilled goals the world set for them and then finding they’ve fulfilled nothing in themselves; many enough kids end up junkies for having decided the world’s goals aren’t worth trying for and being unable to set any of their own. A few fortunate combine the two (I don’t mean drink and drugs, but meaning your own and worldy goals), and your education and growing up now are vitally important because learning the world’s goals (even marks in school) gives you the material to form your own—and don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean that by your 16th birthday you should know whether you want to be a poet or an astronaut, but only have a hungry curiosity in all directions for anything that brings you and your mind to life.”

- William Gaddis, from a letter to his son, Matthew, written in 1973.  From the forthcoming collection of his correspondence, published by Dalkey Archive:  http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GCOI=15647100244880 (via slowlistener)

“Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…”

- Gibbs - JR - William Gaddis (via ohheytherehi)

adamferriss:

trying to port my pixel sorting script from processing to ofx. Getting close, but some data leakage has occurred.

adamferriss:

lost in that ol’ iostream again

Ercan Akkaya


Ercan Akkaya

nevver:

8-bit

adamferriss:

today’s flight

nevver:

What we’re reading

adamferriss:

green valley

theantidote:

Tower of Babel - Stages 1 thru 9 GIF

A collaborative project by Jeff Konigsberg and Adam Toht

(via gateofgod:)

Perhaps not unexpectedly, Richard Seymour’s Unhitched has roused Christopher Hitchens’ legion of defenders and apologists to indignation, and Seymour has risen to the occasion in characteristically scathing fashion.   

In the Washington Post: “The author — a Marxist writer and activist born in Northern Ireland and living in London — has done his research, apparently having read almost everything his subject ever wrote, but in the service of the narrow goals of the over-zealous prosecutor…Seymour insists on advancing his argument from solid ground onto very thin ice.”

In response, Verso will soon be publishing Seymour’s new trilogy of Stieg Larsson-style books: “The Strident Marxist Who Went Too Far, The Strident Marxist Who Didn't Go Far Enough, and The Strident Marxist Who Went Far Enough, Took Pictures, Came Back and Mailed Them To Your Mama.”

In The New Statesman, George Eaton says that if Hitchens was a “flack” of the Bush administration as Seymour argues, then “the president should have ordered a replacement.” Yet Eaton goes on to state, “there was no more formidable defender [than Hitchens] of the Enlightenment values of reason, secularism and internationalism.” Let’s hear what Hitchens has to say about it. “I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.” “Do I think our civilization is superior? Yes, I do.” “Those who view the history of North America as a narrative of genocide and slavery…can think of the Western expansion of the United States only in terms of plague blankets, bootleg booze and dead buffalo, never in terms of the medicine chest, the wheel and the railway.” Perhaps Enlightenment values should have ordered a replacement. 

Meanwhile, James Kirchick of Newsweek (in a piece which Seymour calls “the most deliciously splenetic fanboy tribute to unreasoning hysteria that it has ever been my pleasure to gloat about”) even goes as far as to accuse Seymour as “mock[ing] Hitchens, along with anyone else who viewed with alarm the murder of 3,000 Americans.” As Seymour points out, “Hitchens was himself the first to belittle such alarm.  It's ‘not that terrifying’, he claimed.  ‘That kind of thing happens in a war, it has to be expected in a war, if you’re in a war you’re gonna lose a building or a plane, and maybe a small town or a school or – you should reckon about once a week. Get ready for it.’” Nice. Someone with such an abundance of respect for human life certainly deserves to be so vigorously defended. 

The NY Daily News claims that this represents “3,000 pages of Shakespeare and Sophocles in four months.” Don’t recall the exact amount, but for a Shakespeare course I took at Cal (though was not an English major), we read something on the order of 17 plays. Suppose with introductions that must be in the range of 1,500 pages. That was on top of reading for poli sci coursed (my major), which I recall actually being a significant number more pages than the Shakespeare.

Innovation Ohio is a nonpartisan think tank that studies public policy in the state. Its reports are carefully researched and documented.

Its latest study finds that charter schools, a favorite “reform” of Governor John Kasich and the Republican-dominated legislature, cost taxpayers twice as much as public schools and hurt the public schools that enroll the other 90% of the children in the state.

I almost felt bad for Jesse Ruiz last night as I watched him play the fool to Wendy Katten on Chicago Tonight. Armed only with an embarrassed grin, a pocket full of cliches ("it's for the kids"... "it's about teaching and learning"..."all hands on deck"...) and a bag full of half-truths and misinformation, Rahm's hand-picked board V.P Ruiz was sent out to face the Raise Your Hand's Wendy Katten and Catalyst's Rebecca Harris to try and defend the indefensible -- CPS's list of 129 "underutilized" schools slated for closure.

It was a total mismatch. Katten, armed with credible information, waited patiently as Ruiz spouted the party line:

"It's under-utilization that's driving it. We want to right-size the footprint. There's been a drop in the student population of Chicago of about 145,000 over the last decade."

Then she turned on the lights:

"We assessed the utilization formula and found that it allows for overcrowding. You can have 36 kids in a classroom under this formula and still be deemed efficient. So it doesn't allow for space for things like music rooms, art rooms..."

Ruiz: "Figures can be argued with ... so if we're off by a few percentage points, we still have a big problem that has to be dealt with." 

Katten: "I just want to add that we have lost 30,000 children in the past decade. It's just wrong to keep using numbers [145,000] that mislead."

Off by a few percentage points, Jesse??  Uh uh. The difference between CPS losing 145,000 and 30,000? You're only off by about 80%. That's an F on the math section on any standardized test. Back to first grade.

BTW, despite having chaired ISBE, Ruiz is no educator. He's a partner at Drinker Biddle & Reath's Corporate and Securities Group, specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Before that, he worked for the privatization firm of Booz Allen & Hamilton. His motives should be clear.  He doesn't lack for information. He knows the figures as well as anyone. His spreading of disinformation is purposefully misleading.

Reason #897 for replacing mayoral control of the schools with an elected school board.

by Christie Thompson

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama again called for Congress to take quick action on gun control. “These proposals deserve a vote,” he said. “Because in the two months since Newtown, more than a thousand birthdays, graduations, and anniversaries have been stolen from our lives by a bullet from a gun.”

In the two months since Sandy Hook, debate has surged over how to address America’s epidemic of gun violence. In late January, the Senate Judiciary Committee began ongoing hearings on proposals to tighten restrictions on gun sales.

We’ve dug into the NRA’s efforts to block gun control policy, compared spending on both sides of the issue, and laid out five gun laws you probably never heard of. But with so much media coverage, it can be hard to keep facts straight. To help, we've compiled some of the best graphics on guns, from where they’re purchased to the laws governing how they’re used.

Gun sales:

Tracing the national flow of guns, Washington Post, October 2010

A 2010 graphic from The Washington Post shows how "states with strong gun laws import [guns] from states with weaker laws." The map uses 2009 data of firearms recovered by police.

 

 

Where 50,000 Guns Recovered in Chicago Came From, New York Times, January 2013

There have been nearly 50 homicides in Chicago already this year, despite some of the strictest gun ordinances in the country. So where are the guns coming from? This New York Times map traces the origins of 50,000 guns recovered by police from 2001 to March 2012.

 

 

Gun laws and politics:

Gun laws in the US, state by state, The Guardian US, December 2012

Any conversation on regulation is complicated by the huge variation in gun laws from state to state. This Guardian US interactive lays out regulations by state, from concealed handgun laws to background checks.

 

 

Where Congress Stands on Guns, ProPublica, January 2013

Do you know where your representative stands on gun control? This chart details NRA and ratings and contributions, Brady scores and votes on the 1994 assault weapons ban.

 

 

 

Gun Rights Campaign Contributions, Slate, January 2013

Find out how much gun rights advocates donated to members of Congress in the last election cycle.

 

 

 

How the NRA exerts influence over Congress, Washington Post, January 2013

The Washington Post visualizes which members of Congress "get the most--and least--support" from the NRA.

 

 

 

 

This is Your Representative on Guns, The Daily Beast, February 2013

Input your address and get an overview of your representative’s positions on gun control as well as NRA contributions for each. The Daily Beast is also aggregating gun-related tweets by politicians at @YourRepsOnGuns.

 

 

Gun violence:

Long Weekend of Gun Deaths, NBC News, January 2013

A tick tock of gun deaths over the MLK holiday weekend details incidents by type, including accidental shootings, murders, police shootings, self defense and suicide.

 

 

 

Gun Homicide Rates, The Washington Post, December 2012

A detailed look at firearm homicides across the United States and around the world.

 

 

 

 

The U.S. Shooting Epidemic, The Daily Beast, July 2012

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence estimates a multiple-victim shooting happens once every 5.9 days in the U.S. That totals at least 431 such shootings since 2005. The Daily Beast mapped the Brady Campaign’s data to see where such violence occurs.

 

 

America Under the Gun, Mother Jones, December 2012

Over 140 people were killed or injured in seven mass shootings in the U.S. last year. As part of a special report, Mother Jones compiled a series of graphics on the victims of mass shootings, and the spread of looser gun laws across the country.

 

 

U.S. Gun Crime, The Guardian, December 2012

Gun laws vary across the country, but how much difference is there in gun crime? The Guardian has a state-by-state comparison, charting stats including firearm murders as a percent of all murders, and the number of gun robberies per 100,000 people.

 

 

 

How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?, Slate, January 2013

So far, Slate has recorded at least 1,795 victims of gun violence since the morning of December 14th, the day of the Sandy Hook shooting. Slate is also crowdsourcing gun death reports on Twitter with @GunDeaths. As they point out, “the data is necessarily incomplete,” but they attempt to give a name to each recorded victim.

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thingsmagazine:

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If Cavell had done no more than show a way out of the impasse of the philosophy of his youth—one, as it turned out, largely ignored by his peers (for whom ideas like the “ordinary” remained far too vague)—he would today be remembered as little more than a curious footnote in American intellectual history. Fortunately, half of his career has been taken up with the more practical concern of how to “reconstruct the everyday.” This he has done, with a success that can only be called stunning, through interpretations of literature and film. Having encountered his specific readings, one returns to his more general work with awe, as if, without quite realizing it the first time around, he must have been penetrating into the essence of things. Cavell’s approach to literature is so successful because, unlike other Anglo-American philosophers who have written about literature, like Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, his thought seems to operate not by reading philosophy into literature, taking pre-existing ideas and finding them confirmed, but by reading philosophy out of literature, letting literature surprise him, allowing it to change and even create his most fundamental ideas. As Cavell puts it, “Since melodramas together with tragedy classically tell stories of revenge, philosophical skepticism will in turn be readable as such a story.” Plays like King Lear and Othello and The Winter’s Tale (discussed in essays throughout his work, later collected in Disowning Knowledge [1987]) thus become about philosophy, and treatises like the Discourse on Method and The Critique of Pure Reason turn out to be about revenge. All reveal what’s at stake when we are rebuffed by the world, attempt to enact retribution (whether through thought or rhetoric or action), and are forced to confront what we’ve denied.

Michael Lewis

Capital
by John Lanchester

Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

The London Stock Exchange, 1955

If you had to pick a city on earth where the American investment banker did not belong, London would have been on any shortlist. In London, circa 1980, the American investment banker had going against him not just widespread commercial lassitude but the locals’ near-constant state of irony. Wherever it traveled, American high finance required an irony-free zone, in which otherwise intelligent people might take seriously inherently absurd events: young people with no experience in finance being paid fortunes to give financial advice, bankers who had never run a business orchestrating takeovers of entire industries, and so on.

 

Listen to Thom Andersen discuss his recent film Reconversão as part of last month’s First Look at the Museum of the Moving Image.

 

Still from Reconversão by Thom Andersen. Image Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

 

Thom Anderson and David Schwartz on Reconversão.

This podcast is presented in partnership with Museum of the Moving Image, where Thom Andersen participated in a Q&A with David Schwartz following a New York premiere screening of Reconversão during the Museum’s First Look 2013 showcase on January 12, 2013. BOMB will be publishing more podcasts from MOMI’s First Look Series in the coming weeks.

David Schwartz It’s hard to believe it’s taken this many years for us, the museum, to get Thom Andersen here. We’ve certainly shown his films in the past. He has a wonderful documentary about Eadweard Muybridge, Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, which we’ve shown, which had a week-long run at the Public Theater years ago. It’s a really great film. When he made his documentary essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself, that film also had a run in the city, I think it played at Film Forum. We did a whole film series based on it, but we’re really thrilled that the New York premier of Reconversão, the film that you’re about to see, is taking place right now, and we’re very, very grateful that Thom Andersen flew in just for this screening.

Thom Andersen Thanks for having me. I really am grateful for this screening, and showing it here in this theater. I just thought I might tell you a little about the genesis and history of this project. It was a commissioned film from . . . well actually a film festival in Vilo de Conde in Portugal with a budget of €10,000 from the European Economic Community to develop the economy of Northern Portugal. It was supposed to be a short film. They commissioned a number of short films. And this was one of those, it turned out to be a little longer, and it ran over budget. So like a lot of architects, sometimes, I lost money on it. But anyway . . . so, I was told I could do anything I wanted as long as I did the shooting in Northern Portugal.

For a long, time I wanted to make an architectural film. This seemed like an opportunity. And I liked Souto de Moura originall. I think I was attracted not only by his buildings but also by his writings and his conception of architecture and his thoughtfulness about what he was doing. But anyway, Portugal is a unique country. They have their own way of doing things, and when I first arrived to do research in January of last year, I was a little surprised because it seemed that the Portuguese line producer hadn’t done any of the preparatory work that I would have expected. So basically we just drove around Northern Portugal looking for these buildings, and sometimes it took hours and hours to find some of the rural ones. Then we would just knock on the door and ask the people if we could just look at their house. The thing was that everyone was actually very helpful, the people we found. Also, I guess the way you find things in Portugal is you drive real close to it and then you ask somebody, and then you get a little closer and you ask somebody else, and eventually you find your way to where you’re going. So that’s what we did in January, we had about two weeks of research, and at that time we were able to see some, but not all, of the buildings that I had decided I wanted to film. And then on the basis of that, I wrote a script, and then with a crew, we went back in March, and had two weeks then to shoot the movie. Which meant basically one building a day. So again, there was a lot of driving as well as shooting.

But this time, I think we had arrangements to shoot everything, except for actually his most famous project, the Braga Stadium, which was quite problematic because the sporting club, Braga, was not happy with what he did for their stadium, even though it’s become a great landmark that actually appeared on a Portguese postage stamp. But they had a dispute. There are two sides of the stadium that aren’t filled in, and they wanted one of those sides filled in so they could have more seats. And there were some other problems. So they were not at all pleased to have someone shoot a film about Souto de Moura there. But it just happened that the owner of one of his houses in Braga, who just happened to be Souto de Moura’s cousin, was friends with the mayor of Braga, and she got him to intervene and force the sporting club of Braga to agree to our filming the stadium, but only at the very last minute. Like two days before we left, we were able to actually film that. So, that’s the story, and actually it was a lot of fun doing the movie, even though it was kind of crazy, I enjoyed my trips.

Essentially there were five of us: the line producer Raquel de Silva, who worked extremely hard, the producer’s son, who didn’t do anything, three of us from the United States, myself and the guy who made the images, Peter Bo Rappmund, who was a collaborator in the sense that I was interested in working with him because of this method of animation that he’s developed. So the film is, in a certain way, a throwback to the beginning days of cinema. The images are animated, kind of like Muybridge. It’s similar to stop motion or time-lapse cinematography, but it’s not the same, it’s actually still images animated. Images sometimes, one-per-second or two-per-second, or one every other second. I wanted to use that method because I thought it would be particularly appropriate with an architectural subject. And actually most of the budget went for flying us from the United States to Portugal. It’s kind of expensive to fly to Porto. So there’s Peter, and me, the sound recordist, my wife, Christine Chang. And I’d also like to acknowledge one other person who was indispensable in the making of the film, Encke King, who recorded the narration under difficult circumstances, because I would keep changing it all the time. He kind of did it day-by-day, it wasn’t all done at once, it was done over like 20 days in his bedroom. He’s here today, and it’s the first time he’s seen the film, so I hope he will like it, and not be too embarrassed. He also did the voice over recording for Los Angeles Plays Itself, so he’s become my . . . muse? Doppelgänger? Double? My voice. So thanks.

DS We should acknowledge your voice artist . . . is he here still? Mr. King?

TA There are a few things that need to be fixed. It’s still got to be mixed, even though it’s been shown for six months. It was kind of hurried to try to finish. For the first screening in July in Vilo de Conde, so we didn’t really quite finish it. So we’re still working with sound.

DS Did you try to keep it at the assigned length? Or was it always going to be longer than the commission?

TA No. Well, I said, “Maybe I’ll make a longer film.” And they said, “That’s fine.” It could be any length I wanted.

DS How long were you familiar with Souto de Moura’s work before this project? You reading, studying him, that seemed so much simpatico between the two of you.

TA Actually, only since I first went to Northern Portugal, which was the summer before. So not that long.

DS I mean the film that you made after the Los Angeles architecture film, your movie, Get Out of the Car, were you interested in decaying landscape, sort of the decay of urban landscapes, Los Angeles has something in common with this.

TA First of all, Souto de Moura said that after we talked, he felt like we’d known each other for 20 years, which was very nice. We had a good talk, and he came to the first screening in Vilo de Conde in July, and he liked the film, and was moved by it, and said it made him cry. Yeah, Get Out of the Car, it’s about buildings and fragments of buildings, and it does show one building by R.M. Schindler, his Bethlehem Baptist Church, which is one Compton Avenue in South Los Angeles, which is actually quite rundown and decayed. It’s kind of like the Casa das Artes. There’s a problem with the roof, and it’s no longer in use, and it has a caretaker who comes by maybe once a week and washes off some of the graffiti, and goes back. Another building, which was Harvey’s Broiler in Downey, which was illegally torn down without a permit, and then was restored under the auspices of Bob’s Big Boy. So it’s no longer a Harvey’s Broiler, but it’s now Bob’s Big Boy Broiler. And it’s sort of a classic coffee house from the 1950s, well-known from its appearances in many movies.

DS You mentioned Eadweard Muybridge a little bit in the beginning, but could you talk about the filmmaking technique? The stop-motion animation that seems so perfect to capture this idea of, it’s almost like we’re feeling time passing from the viewpoint of the building.

TA Yeah, well I wish we had a bit more time, because, you know, sometimes in his work, Peter takes more time. He’ll sort of camp out at a site and film all night, or spend a day. Although in his last film, which is called Tectonics, and is about the border between Mexico and the United States, he said that on the United States side he had to be able to do all the filming within five seconds because somebody would come along, border patrol people would come along, and tell him to stop. We were doing this right after that, so for him this was quite a leisurely production.

DS And what was the main source of Souto de Moura’s writings and thoughts? Was it one particular book or a series of articles and books?

TA Well there’s a good large book about his work which is no longer in print. I think it was done by Italian architecture students, but there’s an English version, which is just called Eduardo Souto de Moura. I think the author is Giovanni Lucci or something, which has some critical writings, but it also reproduces many of his project descriptions and longer writings, such as Nexus. He hasn’t written a lot of text because he’s a very careful writer. One of his other slogans is that “only the exact word will be of use.” So he doesn’t write that much. But he’s written interested texts about Álvaro Siza [Vieira], who was one of his teachers. And he began his career in Siza’s firm until Siza kicked him out, because he said, “You have to develop your own practice.”

DS I want to open it up for questions, so just raise your hand if you want to join in.

Audience member (Question inaudible)

DS Okay, so if you could just talk about your decision to end with Ahmad Jamal.

TA The music by Ahmad Jamal? I’m trying to remember where I first found out about his obsession with Miles Davis. It wasn’t actually being in his office. I guess it was in some other interview and it kind of interested me, because he didn’t explain it. We talked about Miles Davis, and his kind of obsession, although he’s interested in different kinds of music, as well. You’ll find also classical music in his office as well as Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal. He does have every Mile Davis recording in his office. And I just thought it was interesting because it was a kind of important statement about the creative process. And then he did end by talking about how when he heard Miles Davis talking about Ahmad Jamal and his particular interest in Ahmad Jamal which he had actually for a long time. I felt it might be then better to end with Ahmad Jamal rather than Miles Davis, because he talked about Jamal at the end. And it was a fortunate choice because we wrote Ahmad Jamal about the rights to the music, which is actually from his very last album, called Blue Moon. The tune we used is called “Morning Mist.” We wrote and also sent a copy of the movie, and he wrote back this very nice letter saying that he appreciated the music and that we could have the rights to the song, but he wouldn’t accept payment for it. I was moved by that, but also, it was helpful in being to finish the film without putting more money into it, which I didn’t have. So I’d like to thank him for that.

Audience member (Question inaudible)

DS Did your budget, the €10,000 that you had, include your post-production?

TA Well as it turned out, it didn’t. It paid for our plane tickets to Porto. It paid for our expenses in Portugal, and it paid for some of the salaries for filming. But to save some money while we were there, we were accommodated in . . . they called it “touring housing,” but it lacked hot water, but not mosquitoes. I mean, I’m exaggerating a bit. So you could turn the shower on and you would have maybe five minutes of hot water so you could kind of take a shower if you were lucky. But it wasn’t great, but that was a way of . . . so we didn’t have to pay for a hotel there. So yeah, in the end, it almost paid for the expenses of filming, but it didn’t pay for any of the postproduction, as it turned out.

DS Do you plan on exploring architecture more as a subject. I mean, there’s such a way that what you’ve done in your other films, you’ve used film history as a type of artifact that reveals a lot about culture and politics and the society that the film was made in, and you use architecture in the same way in this film. The idea of architecture as an artifact. Is that something that you want to do more?

TA This is a film unlike my other films, where I think it poses questions rather than providing answers, because in this case, I don’t know that much about Souto de Moura. Is there people that know more about him than I do. Whereas in the other films, I didn’t feel that way.

DS You thought those were more like lessons?

TA No, no. With the other films, I always felt like I knew as much as anybody about Muybridge. But here I thought I could only pose questions, and they were the sort of questions that he poses in some of his writings, such as, “Who is architecture for?” “How can architects affect the ways in which their buildings are used?” “How can architects create what he calls a ‘functional city’?” Which, of course, he says is precisely a city in which the buildings go beyond their function. In which the buildings leave traces in our memories and leave interesting ruins.

So the question about architecture which has interested me the most is, I’ll say, libel against modern architecture, as it’s known now, modernist architecture, that didn’t serve the needs of the people. Or that it’s efforts at social engineering or trying to create affordable housing for working class people failed. To me, that’s a myth that I would like to combat, and I’d like to do it with a film about Los Angeles architecture, and particularly about R.M. Schindler and Rudolf Neutra, who were both concerned with those questions and found various solutions which are—or maybe not—still valued, or appreciated, as much as they should be. I mean, the fact is that Schindler, unlike other modern architects created a low-cost architecture for people. Although the people were primarily what you might call middle class. They’re mostly from his circle of bohemian friends. But for these people he created very cheap houses, by using standard construction techniques and sometimes low-cost materials. Whereas Neutra was more concerned with large apartment buildings, and he created one of the most successful of those projects in his Channel Height housing which was made for war workers in 1941, which is now lost. But he was the person involved in the commission for this large housing project in Chavez Ravine, which was opposed by the building interests and finally voted down by the city council and by the people of Los Angeles, which is the story told in Los Angeles Plays Itself, although I don’t mention Neutra as being the architect.

DS Could you just talk a little bit about the title? I think that you said that the English translation, or reconversion, doesn’t quite do the word justice.

TA It’s not that so much. Originally the title was going to be Ruins or Ruínas, but that turned out to be a significant Portuguese film by Mozos, I believe, so we couldn’t use that. This seemed appropriate because quite a lot of his work is referred to in Portuguese as reconversão, such as the monastery at Santa María do Bouro, which he turned into the pousada, which is a chain of historic inns that they have in Portugal, which are these old historic buildings turned into hotels. Or his first project, or a number of others. So the literal English translation of reconversão would be reconversion, but there’s no word in English, reconversion. To me that suggests something of a different philosophy towards those kinds of projects that exists in Portugal and doesn’t exist in the United States, so that would be a combination of conservation, preservation, conversion, adaptation, adaptive reuse. All of these things.

DS The story of the marketplace that was turned into a garden and became a marketplace again was a great story. I don’t know if you had a favorite among these projects, like a personal favorite, or one that struck you as the most beautiful.

TA Well if there’s one I was going to live in, it would be the house on Rio de Rijalt. If I wanted to live in the country, it would be maybe the house, which is very small, though. Well, I guess it’s designed as a vacation house, as a weekend house. So, no, I don’t have a favorite. Maybe, in a way, it’s the monastery.

Audience member (Question inaudible)

TA Yeah, and that’s since the film is a little misleading, because he’s done other sorts of things, as well. He’s working now on a kind of sports multi-purpose stadium, which is a project that’s been in the works for a long time, but he’s also done a couple of tall buildings. There are skyscrapers, one in Porto and one in a kind of suburb. And I didn’t photograph those, because I’m not really into skyscrapers. To me they’re like sandwiches. But they are very elegant solutions to the problems of tall buildings. Also, a number of other reconversions which are quite fascinating, turning this old jail in Porto into a photography museum, while maintaining quite a bit of the jail, and turning the old customs house into a transportation museum, and a number of new museums, also, which is also one of his most famous buildings, which is near the Lisbon Paolo Reggio Museum, which I should have shown, but because of the limitations of the budget, we only filmed in Northern Portugal, and that’s in the south. And then a lot of unrealized projects are also different. In the Middle East, he also wanted to create a university city, which is something that fell through, although he put a lot of work into that project. So the range is even broader than the film suggests.

Can I mention this sort of funny story about Braga Stadium? Braga made it into the European Champion’s league. Although it’s a small town, the team has been pretty successful but they were definitely the underdogs. I think actually they were playing Newcastle. As it turned out, although they lost both games, they played pretty well and they gave Newcastle a battle, really. So one game was played at the Braga Stadium, and the lights went out, which was something almost unheard of. And it took them 20 minutes to restore the light so the play could be resumed. It was quite a dramatic moment. And the announcer on the English broadcast said that they were stuck between a rock and a hard place, having a joke about the architecture of the stadium.

“Death Travels West, Watch Him Go” by Mike Newirth

Here’s an extraordinary essay by Mike Newirth on the gun culture, the massacre culture, and the Market, tragically relevant today even though we published it in The Baffler way back in 2001. It’s especially alarming when you realize that we’ve forgotten all the mass-murder details that were so shocking back then—because they’ve been superseded by other, bloodier massacres.