beauty
You are viewing stuff tagged with beauty.
You are viewing stuff tagged with beauty.
Matthew Christopher, on visiting and photographing The SS United States: Philadelphia’s Abandoned Ocean Liner:
As I looked out of the [SS United States] over the strip malls and parking lots that sprawled out before the ship’s bow, it struck me that maybe as a culture we are losing the capability to incorporate things of such remarkable grandeur into the fabric of our lives. We see something magnificent and instead of feeling that transcendent awe and humility, maybe we view it as a threat to the worth of the generally shabby architectural constructs we pepper our cities with today. Rather than a cause for celebration, things of beauty are merely to be gleefully demolished or to be hacked apart for the base elements they are made of. The real failure is in our own inability to save something like the SS United States, not in its inability to integrate itself into our world. We may now have massive cruise ships serving as seaborne vacation metropolises, but it would be hard to argue that they approach the class or elegance of the passenger liners that preceded them. Maybe as a symbol of who we are, we just don’t deserve the SS United States any more. Maybe we never did. I leave that judgment to you.
The Most Beautiful Shots in The History of Disney is, of course, filled with plenty of amazing scenes of animation. But the music, my god, hook up some headphones and behold Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Flight from the City.
I’ve had this file, 20111229_fa_02.mp3 sitting on my desktop for a while. It’s Terry Gross’s final interview with Maurice Sendak, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Bumble-Ardy. I knew that, in 2011, it made me think when I heard it, but I had forgotten what it was: a creative human, successful in his time, looking back with his hand lightly brushing old scars and lamenting the accretion of new cuts as he watches, unable to affect the marching-on of time:
I’ve largely discontinued my previous practice of linking to every little thing that I see on the internet that is interesting. I’ve done this because I find the most satisfying posts that I go back and read are the ones where I talk about how I feel and what’s going on, not the posts where I link to the latest article I’ve read. After all, one would rather know the person that all that reading and thinking produced, and not necessarily all the reading and thinking that person did.
I’m frequently looking for songs to play that can be described as achingly beautiful. Thankfully, I’ve the perfect example of that today. It’s a song by José González from his 2007 album In Our Nature called Fold.
Just learned a word I have absolutely never heard before. Pulchritude, meaning beauty. Attempts to pronounce it begin now.
Between my finals in neuroscience, physiology, and prosthodontics, my brain has been working on an interesting, rather troubling exercise: understanding beauty. Lord knows why my mind gets preoccupied with the ideas it does. Nonetheless, here I am: I can’t wrap my head around the concept. I am, in many ways, a prototypical nerd; as such, an unknowable system or domain irks me. Cf. the aforelinked article:
I’ve an image file on my computer that says “Life is beautiful.” I was going to print it out and hang it up until I realized this: I don’t think the word “beauty” is enough to capture this life. (“Life is many things, including beautiful” probably wouldn’t read well on the wall.) The shortcomings of this adjective make me think there’s one problem with intense, focused training: it reveals the world to the participant in one dimension, from one angle, in one color, from one perspective. Yet the glory of living pushes out from the uncountable, myriad aspects of reality.
Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness sounds a bit dull at first, but consider what that means: an automated software approach to actually making faces more attractive. I must provide a picture illustrating the results (originals on the top, computer-enhanced results on the bottom):