Tag: In Times of Dragons
-
Henri Cartier-Bresson
The Geometry of the Instant Henri Cartier-Bresson invented a way of seeing so complete that it became the unconscious grammar of photography itself. Then, quietly, he put down the camera and went back to drawing. He had always said it was a sketchbook, not a vocation. He meant it. Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris,…
-
New Orleans: The City That Invented Itself
New Orleans in October, when the heat finally breaks and the most singular city in America remembers what it is Sometime in October — the exact date varies by year, but the Crescent City knows it when it arrives — the first cool front comes off the Gulf and the temperature drops ten degrees overnight…
-
The Reel Argument: Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi made films about women being destroyed by the world, and he made them with a camera that moves like a conscience — slowly, continuously, unable to look away. He is the greatest filmmaker Japan has produced on the subject of female suffering, which is to say he is the greatest filmmaker Japan has…
-
The Human Condition According to Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas believed that language was not the instrument through which experience was described but the medium in which it was created — that the poem did not report on the world but summoned it, called it into existence through the sheer incantatory force of sound and rhythm and the collision of unexpected words. This…
-
Saul Bass & The Seventy Seconds That Changed Everything
Saul Bass did not invent the film title sequence. He did something more consequential: he convinced Hollywood that the audience’s first minute and a half was not dead time to be tolerated but a work of art to be made. Everything that followed — in cinema, in corporate identity, in the visual culture of the…
-
What’s So Special About New Order
New Order made the most unlikely record in the history of popular music. Three people whose previous band had defined the outer limits of post-industrial English despair, whose singer had hanged himself eight months before the recording sessions began, whose entire artistic identity had been built on darkness and weight and the refusal of consolation…
-
The Shadow and the Sun: Who We Are According to Plato
He was the most gifted prose writer in the history of philosophy and the most dangerous thinker in the Western tradition. He gave us the Forms, the cave, the immortal soul, the philosopher-king, and the suspicion — never quite extinguished in the two and a half thousand years since — that the world we see…
-
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Everyone, All at Once Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted crowds, seasons, proverbs, and catastrophes. He was the first painter to look at ordinary people and decide that their lives were the whole subject. Five centuries later, no one has done it better. In the lower right corner of a painting completed around 1558, a pair…
-
Istanbul: The City That Contains Everything
Istanbul in the autumn and the case for one of the world’s great cities at its most completely itself There is a moment, arriving in Istanbul for the first time, when the scale of the city’s ambition becomes briefly visible all at once. It happens most reliably from the Bosphorus — from a ferry crossing…
-
Sacré-Cœur: Faith, Politics and a Night Above Paris
Sacré-Cœur occupies an unusual place in the imagination of Paris. Its white domes are immediately recognisable, yet the familiarity of the silhouette can obscure the complexity of the building beneath it. Above Montmartre’s streets, the basilica brings together religious devotion, nineteenth-century political conflict and an architecture designed to make belief visible across a city. Its…
