velcro city tourist board
a blog by Paul Graham Raven
science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats
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much more than a dispassionate record of events
The retrospective coloring of historical judgment shows that history is much more than a dispassionate record of events; it is a dynamic, living web of interpretations. We are not doomed to a false choice between purely objective facts and revisionism, with its often-groundless contestation of those fact[s]. Instead, we ought to observe, carefully and critically,…
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02MAY22 / accessions
Actually bought on Saturday, but whatevs. Accessions department takes weekends off sometimes.
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peter cook
Yep, the Archigram guy. (Insert your own “Dudley Moore notable by his absence” gag here.) From his just-now-ending retrospective exhibition at Louisiana, Denmark. A fifty-plus-year career of drawing the wildest way-out shit and still managing to package it as architecture*; an inspiration for eccentrics of all sorts. Beating that sort of path for yourself anywhere…
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infused also with insistence, perdurance, determination
To some, the very notion of a virtue of pessimism may seem absurd. For instance, we may subscribe to Hume’s notion that the mark of any virtue is that it is useful and agreeable, either to the person who possesses it or to others. But surely pessimism is neither useful nor agreeable. It is not…
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drink up, bar’s closed
Well, that happened quickly, didn’t it? Twitter’s board demonstrating that (to use a lovely British turn of phrase) they have the breaking strain of a KitKat… Now seeing lots of second-hand reports of exodus from the birdsite, and I ain’t gonna judge, because I went and stopped using it (again) back at the turn of…
Who is Paul Graham Raven?
“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”