Veritas et Venustas

Architecture Critic of the Year

Curbed's Lockhart Steele

With nothing left to live for, children hurl themselves from the High Line to a fiery death on the streets below. [more]>

Click here for an early architecture post, on The Wonder That Is The New York Highline.

It's The Dying, Stupid!

Post Script: I've watched a lot of bad movies on DVD the last last 12 months. Sicko makes up for most of them. Find more information at the Sicko website and at Michael Moore's site.

SICKO is a great movie. You may think you know how sick our health care system is, but this movie will probably make you realize you're an optimist on the subject.

Watch people tell their stories of denied benefits, only to learn they're now dead, because of those denials. Listen to stories of children shuffled from "out of system" hospitals to "in system" HMO hospitals who die in transit.

Like all Michael Moore movies, it also makes you laugh. And it made me think I will probably vote for Obama. The lobbyists are out of control, and Hillary benefits from them as much as anyone.

Tidings of Comfort & Joy

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
hitched to everything else in the universe.”

John Muir, Sierra Club founder

P e a c e  &  L o v e  i n  t h e  N e w  Y e a r

Christmas at King's College Choir, Cambridge

Festivus, for the rest of us

YouChoose

I THINK the Buck Rogers looking French tram (the French always like Buck Rogers) seen below looks bad next to the French buildings and in turn makes them look bad. The Viennese have also gone Futuristic, but look at their previous three generations, in the third video. Don't they fit the city better?

Some Swiss trams follow (after a lot of ugly buses, you can advance to the middle of the video), and then an interesting ride through some narrow streets in Lisbon.

Oprah Obama

I DON'T KNOW if I can bring myself to vote for Hillary. She's certainly smart, but as people are increasingly asking, Does she have judgment? I still picture her as the harsh technocrat, and wonder if she has the leadership that we'll need in the next few years to deal with Iraq, Global Warming, Peak Oil, the growth of China and India, and the decline of the dollar? Can she resist the corporate donors who give her so much? They don't want solutions to many of these problems, because they've made such unprecedented sums from them.

We need a change. We want a change. We need someone who sees the world differently. So I was interested to see this in the New York Times:

This movement has its own religious tone. References to faith abound in Mr. Obama’s writings and speeches, as they do in Oprah’s language on her TV show and at his rallies. Five years ago, Christianity Today, the evangelical journal founded by Billy Graham, approvingly described Oprah as “an icon of church-free spirituality” whose convictions “cannot simply be dismissed as superficial civil religion or so much New Age psychobabble.”

“Church free” is the key. This country has had its fill of often hypocritical family-values politicians dictating what is and is not acceptable religious and moral practice. Instead of handing down tablets of what constitutes faith in America, Romney-style, the Oprah-Obama movement practices an American form of ecumenicalism. It preaches a bit of heaven on earth in the form of a unified, live-and-let-live democracy that is greater than the sum of its countless disparate denominations. The pitch — or, to those who are not fans, the shtick — may be corny. “The audacity of hope” is corny too. But corn is preferable to holier-than-thou, and not just in Iowa.