The man who did too much ... Le Corbusier. Photograph: Corbis

An urbanist who lived in a fishing cottage, an iconoclast who invented the highrise, an architect who wanted to be a painter...the man who designed the 20th century. Le Corbusier is difficult to get a hold on. He's still admired, even worshipped, in architectural circles, but practically forgotten everywhere else. He's arguably had more of an influence on the form of the modern world than any other architect - you could even argue there was no modern world before Le Corbusier - but stop someone on the street and ask them to name one of his buildings and you're unlikely to get a correct answer. And if people have heard of him, it's usually in the context of failed 1960s housing estates. All that might change, though…   more »

He was born here, in this small Spanish Mediterranean town. Or, rather, it was small then, but very old. Twenty-seven centuries ago the Phoenicians had established a settlement here. Among their successors, down the ages, had been Romans remembered by their amphitheatre, and ‘Moors’ from North Africa who had built a fortress, the Alcazar, on top of a hill overlooking the town. His father was an art teacher named Jose Ruiz Blasco. When the child was born on October 25, 1881, he was named Pablo Ruiz Picaso. According to Spanish custom the last surname is that of the child’s mother who, in this case, was Mario Picaso Lopez: Picaso being spelt with only one ‘s’. The name ‘Picaso’ was only a formal appellation. When Pablo was nine years old, he painted his View of Malaga Harbour, showing considerable pictorial talent but, more significantly, he signed it ‘P. Ruiz’…    more »

“The pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it, and the ear of intelligence has never been informed that there existed anything equal to it in the world,” wrote Abdul Razzaq in 1443. In its heyday the Vijayanagara Empire stretched from Orissa to Karnataka. The capital Hampi, covering more than 20 sq.km., was built on the banks of the Tungabhadra river, on a hilly site strewn with huge boulders thrown up by volcanic eruptions lost in eons of geological time. Architecturally and scenically it was, and is, spectacular…    more »

The present narrative in 40 stanzas composed in August 1998 was first published in my book Passing Moments a selection from which appears here: http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/5/12/3686764.html Opportunity is taken to lightly revise it before posting at the sciy. The extensive use and adaptation of Google Images to illustrate some of the themes is the added feature. The narrative concludes with the following stanzas describing the work the Protagonist came here to do.

Even his body’s cells shone
As if countless suns were lit;
The Transcendent’s powers he housed
Where purple majesties sit.

To him thoughts came in serene
Intuitions from the original fount;
Calm words he spoke were words
That had strength death to surmount.

Truth’s abidingnesses he affirmed
In mortality’s devious ways,—
Made his breast a diamond cup
To hold its bliss, its rain and rays.

Nightly aeons had elapsed
For the day of all-love to dawn;
Now in its great resplendence
The wonder of wonders moves on.

Mortal birth he lifted to the sun
And the Will of the High in it willed;
A presence leaned down and things
Promised long ago got fulfilled.
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The first impression is of simple beauty: a tenor voice, cushioned by the ebb and flow of repeating cadences from the orchestra. The stage, enclosed in a curving wall of corrugated metal, evokes a prison: We will be trapped for hours in a world in which nothing happens. But as the music morphs from one pattern to another, the stage picture reveals new vignettes. Piles of wastepaper rise up rustling from the chorus as giant homunculi. A bird walks past on stilt legs. And the corrugated wall opens to admit the towering pale figures of giant puppets, doughy men gathering briefly, like monsters or magi, around the central figure of the singer before departing again as if they had never been, in an evening that moves forward like a dream. The Improbable theater company's production of Philip Glass's "Satyagraha," which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night (11 April 2008), represents the kind of work the Met should be doing. It is an important revival of a major recent piece. It is a significant work of theater. And it provides an all too rare demonstration of the fact that new opera can indeed be a contemporary art…   more »

Once the highest expression of Chinese culture, the Peking Opera is a dying art today. Efforts to revive it have met with a mixed response. The current decline in interest in the opera is attributed to the global phenomenon of a tension between the classical and the modern...   more »

The question of identity is a clear postmodernist concern, and critic Scott Bukatman has added that he believes the issue of human definition is clearly central to the work, and thus the ambiguity is crucial'(14). This view is similar to the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. He argues that Blade Runner' stages a confrontation with our own replicant-status', so it is only when we as humans realize that our notion of self is very much constructed by the world around us, that we can become a truly human subject' ...   more »

I've been reading Corbin for about 25 years now. After Sri Aurobindo's writing Corbin's has been the most significant to me in providing a cartography of the inner life; the world of soul making. James Hillman cites him -along with Carl Jung- as one of the fathers of Archetypal Psychology. I believe that his writing on Mundus Imaginalis, although they concern esoteric practices, are in need of a revival today, in an age when our encounters with imagination are increasingly as projected telemactic images. rc

What is that intermediate universe? It is the one we mentioned a little while ago as being called the "eighth climate." For all of our thinkers, in fact, the world of extension perceptible to the senses includes the seven climates of their traditional geography. But there is still another climate, represented by that world which, however, possesses extension and dimensions, forms and colors, without their being perceptible to the senses, as they are when they are properties of physical bodies. No, these dimensions, shapes, and colors are the proper object of imaginative perception or the "psycho- spiritual senses"; and that world, fully objective and real, where everything existing in the sensory world has its analogue, but not perceptible by the senses, is the world that is designated as the eighth climate. The term is sufficiently eloquent by itself, since it signifies a climate outside of climates, a place outside of place, outside of where (Na-koja-Abad!).

The technical term that designates it in Arabic, 'alam a mithal, can perhaps also be translated by mundus archetypus, ambiguity is avoided. For it is the same word that serves in Arabic to designate the Platonic Ideas (interpreted by Sohravardi terms of Zoroastrian angelology). However, when the term refers to Platonic Ideas, it is almost always accompanied by this precise qualification: mothol (plural of mithal) aflatuniya nuraniya, the "Platonic archetypes of light." When the term refers to the world of the eighth climate, it designates technically, on one hand, the Archetype-Images of individual and singular things; in this case, it relates to the eastern region of the eighth climate, the city of Jabalqa, where these images subsist preexistent to and ordered before the sensory world. But on the other hand, the term also relates to the western region, the city of Jabarsa, as being the world or interworld in which are found the Spirits after their presence in the natural terrestrial world and as a world in which subsist the forms of all works accomplished, the forms of our thoughts and our desires, of our presentiments and our behavior. It is this composition that constitutes 'alam al-mithal, the mundus imaginalis....   more »

Science aims to help us gain an understanding of reality, yet how can that which is dictated by the laws of logic be used to explain the parts of reality that are non-logical? -- Is it possible that art can be used in a scientific way to create a more accurate expression of reality and a greater understanding of human experience?

A recent article by Jonah Lehrer in SEED Magazine called "The Future of Science....Art?" asks whether art is better suited than science to portray the reality of inner experience: ...   more »

For someone who was born and brought up in Karachi, I must confess the cultural distance between the metropolis and the hinterland exists not just in miles. The inhabitants of the city, especially as young and brash as Karachi, have built a hybrid identity from the experience of constant change, chaos and cultural interface. Meanwhile, the people of the interior of Sindh, steeped in the folklore and poetry of its Sufis, zealously guard the purity of their language and interpret life through the prism of conventions shaped by ancient history. What Pakistan, a county that brought together heterogeneous people from all over South Asia, has needed since its inception is an education policy to unify cultures through knowledge and respect for pluralism. While this dream of the founding fathers is forgotten in the midst of political volatility and confrontation, opportunities for reconciliation and an understanding of Pakistan’s diverse traditions are lost. …   more »

It is known that Da Vinci’s parents were not married and that his father was a Florentine notary, Ser Piero. In a tax record dating from 1457, five years after the Italian polymath’s birth, his mother is described as one Caterina, who by then was married to a man from the Tuscan town of Vinci. It was assumed she was a local woman. But, according to Francesco Cianchi, the author of the study, “There is no Caterina in Vinci or nearby villages who can be linked to Ser Piero. The only Caterina in Piero’s life seems to be a slave girl who lived in the house of his wealthy friend, Vanni di Niccolo di Ser Vann.”...   more »

A gold-encrusted dagger belonging to Mughal emperor Shah Jahan is expected to fetch £500,000 when auctioned at Bonhams on Thursday. The dagger is part of the collection of Islamic and Indian art and artefacts of the late textile businessman, Jacques Desenfans. ...   more »

If we have seen the possibilities and pitfalls in Big Science given to us by the American model, we also notice its results in other places,—for example in Japan. Japan's first experience with high-level business and industrial development forms a good illustration to see how one can get trapped on the economic path when something alien enters into the system. Yoshiro Hoshino writes: “There is nothing worse than war for bringing about the destruction of nature, human beings, factories, housing, and transportation systems, and for causing starvation and sickness, the discharge of untreated factory wastes, and the destruction of farm lands. When environmental destruction is understood in its broadest and most fundamental sense, the original culprit is war.” America, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, invaded Japan in another way. It looks as though the evil found another soil to grow and flourish in a vigorous manner. The present article Japan’s Second Defeat after the Second World War forms a chapter of my yet unpublished book Big Science and its Impact on Society....   more »

Picasso captured an intense scene reflecting the deeply unjust suffering, agony and despair experienced by the people of Guernica. And in doing so he produced one of the most iconic, powerful and affecting pieces of anti-war artwork ever put to canvas. It is little surprise then that a reproduction of the painting, which hangs outside the entrance to the UN Security Council, was covered while Colin Powell was attempting to sell the Iraq War to the world.

The people of Iraq are suffering what amounts to the similar unjust brutality inflicted on the people of Guernica Iraq, except it's practically on a daily basis. A more accurate comparison would be to imagine having the London Tube and Bus bombings everyday. And have them happen so often that they become a predictable daily occurrence and part of life."

Guernica was the product of a fascist Spanish-German alliance between Franco and Hitler, and the corportist sponsors of the Luftwaffe. The following collage of images come to us trough the efforts of the Anglo-American alliance of Blair and Bush and through the courtesy of Boeing, Haliburton, Blackwater et al....    more »

Sri Aurobindo’s Beyond the Silence is essentially free quantitative verse with a predominant dactylic movement. It is being presented here along with a painting by Huta Hindocha which illustrates the following lines of the poem:

One with the Eternal, live in his infinity,
Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal. ...   more »