This is another photo of Trial Bay Gaol in the Arakoon State Conservation Area.

For more photos visit:

http://www.kevinswilderness.com/NSW/arakoon.html

For You….M,

Its been a long while
yet I do remember vividly….

Walking by the ruins of the old German Boma and the old palace
Now run down like my heart has been

But today, I feel different
Because I know…
The impossible can be possible!

I wait and will keep waiting…
Knowing that someday…. one day
I will feel the warmth
and strong embrace of your arms.

Siémpre.

Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland is one of my favourite places to visit.  On this occasion I had taken a short walk through the golf course, past the castle and on to Craster.  It was only about three miles with a stop at the pub in Craster for a crab sandwich but there was plenty to look at on the way.

The entrance to Nissa Copyright 2009 Bryan Moore

This was the Entrance to Nissa an ancient City, and one of the first thing I stopped at to see on my trip over Seas.  Traveling to see all these ruins  some had degraded so much that  they just looked like piles of mud but this one still had mud bricks in tact.  some bricks were new in the places where the country had tried to rebuild parts of the ruins other parts were old orignal bricks.  THe guide said that the old bricks  lasted longer than the new  even with modern technology  the ancient brick were made differently that allowed them to last

The second episode of this BBC series is on the architectural history of Berlin. Matt Frei (writer and presenter of the show) is a news presenter more commonly seen on the US version of BBC News. Although he said he was interested in the architecture, it was the social history that seemed to be his principle interest. But Frei’s preference for politico-historical bombast did not detract from what was a very interesting show; his discussion of Albert Speer and the use and reuse of public space fascinated me, particularly when Frei visited the derelict listening station atop the Teufelsberg (‘Devil’s Mountain’).

Derelict NSA Listening Station, Teufelsberg, Berlin

I thought it a great shame that Frei didn’t elaborate the idea of ruin a little further (nothing said about German Romanticism, for instance). That he could talk so passionately about Speer and not mention Speer’s ‘ruin theory of value’ was a surprising omission. Wikipedia tells me that the Teufelsberg was not only built with the rubble of bombed-out Berlin, but this rubble was used to cover a Speer-designed Nazi military-technical college which proved impervious to demolition. Speer’s buildings were built to last 1000 years but when this lifespan was deemed too long by allied forces they covered some of them over with rubble. The irony is too tragic! But the details of this story aren’t nearly as important as the relationship it expresses between narrative, time and the ruin-object:

Ruin has a peculiar sense of temporality, one that registers both the termination and the survival of matter.  The ruin’s demand for narrative projection and manipulation, what Walter Benjamin calls the “irresistible decay” (2002: 178)  of ruin, emerges in how its fragments seem to have both withstood time and fallen prey to time’s relentless wearing and wasting. It seems to me that some of the beguiling charm of a ruin arises through our attempts to attend to this untimeliness, to the time of things that have persisted beyond their end.  This is one of the central paradoxes that permeates many accounts of Romantic ruin: ruins figure both transience and durability, both the entropic dissolution of all material things and the survival of remainders that seem to outlive this dissolution.

So a ruin announces a time that no longer occurs, a time when the building functioned according to human design.  The castle no longer defends, the house no longer gives shelter, the sports arena no longer provides a space for gaming or competition, but these purposes and functions remain bound up in the identity of what is left behind. Even in my earliest memories of visiting ruins, I remember the immediate task was always to transform toppled stones into spaces of combat, romance, or horror: to give a function to objects that no longer functioned, to give time to a thing that had fallen out of time.  With the purposive time of human action and activity at an end, ruins, simply by being labelled a ‘ruin,’ suggest this cinder of a former time, an absent time made present by collapse and decay.

Our impulse to respond to and supplement the lack in the ruin corresponds to that well-worn belief that we all experience ruins subjectively.  As Christopher Woodward has argued, it is precisely because each ruin is materially and temporally incomplete that “each spectator is forced to supply the missing pieces from his or her own imagination” (2001: 15).  Since our perception of a ruin is formed in productive confrontation to these material and temporal absences, we attempt to piece the ruin back together by narrative interpretation.  In this way, ruins are always a ruin of something else, they seem to demand a backstory, a ‘life’ that explains the architectural ‘afterlife’ that we encounter.  Indeed, there’s something about the ruin that seems to demand these sorts of narratives; a projection of was, what wasn’t, or what yet might be.  I’d like to suggest that this kind of ‘hermeneutic exigency’ is an attempt to stabilise and manage the peculiarly abundant, chaotic, and convolved time of ruin.

[For those with a large appetite for Nazi ruins:  www.thirdreichruins.com]

]]> http://peregrinafeminina.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/the-traveler-community/ Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:56:37 +0000 peregrina feminina http://peregrinafeminina.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/the-traveler-community/

August 15, 2009

Where the hell is that? Why are you going there? These were the questions asked by the confused faces of people I encountered along my trip when I told them I was going to Samaipata. I didn’t have the answers. From what I’d read about it, I sensed that it would a be a gorgeous place with wonderful things to discover. What things, I didn’t know.

I’d made a reservation for a lovely looking little place in Samaipata called Hostal Andoriña. I received a prompt response and an important piece of information: constantly remind the bus driver that you’re getting off in Samaipata. I was taking a Sucre to Santa Cruz overnight bus. According to the hostel, people who were trying to get to Samaipata often woke up to find themselves all the way in Santa Cruz.

As I boarded my bus, I told the guy who had taken care of the ticket formalities that I was getting off in Samaipata. He looked shocked even though “Samaipata” had been written and highlighted on my ticket.

Bolivia is home to the notorious “World’s Most Dangerous Road“, but it doesn’t take a traveler long to see that almost every road in Bolivia is dangerous. Steep cliffs, unsurfaced roads, sometimes no road at all, freezing cold temperatures, vehicle breakdowns, running out of gas– these are the realities of overland travel in Bolivia. I’d read that on the World’s Most Dangerous Road, there are dogs spaced out along the beginning waiting for people to offer them food. People believe feeding the dogs will give them good luck on their journeys. Even though this road had no official extreme title, as we pulled away from Sucre, there the dogs were, waiting for their offerings.

The first hour of the drive was fantastic as we rounded the corners of uninhabited mountains and the setting sun illuminated the sky with gorgeous shades of the rainbow. As the sun and the paved road vanished, the drive became a little more sketchy, but not nearly as bad as I imagined. The times that made me nervous where when we found ourselves moving backwards around a bend on a steep cliff. Sometimes the road was too narrow for two vehicles to pass each other.

We made one stop in a town that was in the middle of celebration. Firecrackers lit up the sky, a great surprise after a drive that was increasingly uncomfortable and monotonous. At this stop, I reminded the driver and co. that I was getting off in Samaipata. One of the guys looked annoyed that I was telling him again. But I was determined to not wake up two hours past my destination.

I chatted with the French group I’d hung out with in Sucre and said goodbye. They were several rows behind me and I’d be getting off the bus before them. After a very long stop, we finally left. A few people chased after the bus and hopped on. The chance that you’ll get left behind is yet another dangerous aspect of Bolivian bus travel.

The journey was about 13 hours. I had a great spot in the front row with ample leg room, but a chair that refused to stay reclined. After hours of tossing and turning in my gravity defying chair, I opened my eyes to look at the time. It was just before 6am and if I’d calculated right, we were due to arrive in Samaipata.

I knocked on the door to remind the driver once again that I was getting off in Samaipata. Whaddya know, it was a completely different driver and crew. “Oh, Samaipata?!” I was so glad I got up when I did, because we arrived in Samaipata about 10 minutes later. My broken chair was a blessing in disguise.

At the hostel, I rang the night bell several times before someone answered. I was surprised when a young American girl answered the door. She took my to my room where I immediately went to bed. In the late morning I woke up to sounds of people chatting outside my window.

In the courtyard I found what I didn’t know I was looking for– a traveler community. It was more than the usual coming of age backpacking holidayers; a motley mix of people was scattered about. There were youthful travelers and others with graying hair. Some were flighty, some cantankerous, some effervescent. But regardless of background or personality, you could tell these were all people with an insatiable curiosity about the world. People who felt the urge to move deep in their bones.

There were no barriers in this peculiar community of travelers, and it wasn’t long before I knew a bit about each person there. A Scottish couple, two Australian sisters, a girl from England and I agreed that some or all of us would go on a hike through a giant fern forest nearby the next day.

I peeled myself away from the fascinating assortment of people at the hostel and went into town. In the center of town, there was a main square full of random sculptures and absolutely nothing going on.  At the height of tourist season, it was far from the “major tourist destination” my guidebook described it as. I loved it there. In this sleepy town I felt I was somewhere new and different while simultaneously feeling at home.

I bumped into the Scottish couple and they helped me negotiate a price for a cab to the El Fuerte ruins. Taking a cab is the quick way to get to the ruins, but you can also take a challenging walk. On my way, I passed by the Australian girls trudging up the mountain and hoped they didn’t see me taking the easy way up.

At the top of the mountain where the ruins are, there was a fantastic view of the area. It is amazing how much of Bolivia is so pristine and untouched. The unruliness of the land has saved a lot of it from being destroyed. Not much is known about the ruins of El Fuerte and they were not like any other ruins I’d seen before. I took in sites that were unique to my eyes as I enjoyed a quiet walk around.

Thể loại : Kinh dị, Mỹ

Năm : 2008

Hãng sản xuất : Paramount Pictures

Đạo diễn : Carter Smith

Diễn viên : Jonathan Tucker, Laura Ramsey, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore

Nội dung : 4 sinh viên Mĩ quyết định đi tham hiểm một ngôi đền bỏ hoang tại Cancun, Mexico sau khi bị thuyết phục bởi một hướng dẫn viên người Đức khi anh này đang muốn tìm người em trai thất lạc của mình. Nhưng khi đến được ngôi đền họ bị thổ dân ở đây bao vây không cho ra khỏi khu vực đó. Càng tiến sâu vào ngôi đền họ càng cảm nhận được cái chết đang đến gần.

Audio : English

Subtitles : English – Vietnamese

Chất lượng : HD

Giá : 15.000 đ / 1DVD

Another kind of Wall Art

Kloster Arnsburg, Lich Germany. There is something I always find attractive in old stone work…ancient buildings…ruins…etc. This is is just a section of the wall of the cloister…one frame’s full.

Sanyo CG10 at about 70mm equivalent. F3.7 @ 1/250th @ ISO 50. Programmed Auto.

Cropped very slightly from the right for composition. Punch, AutoTone, and Sharpen Landscapes presets. Blackpoint slightly right. Added Clarity.

From Germany 2009.

because folks liked my last version of this, for your viewing pleasure, below are the books i read last week. it’s a pretty exciting list:

1. Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (Dalkey Archive, 2005): The twentieth century boiled down to painstakingly concise and shocking truths. No one is left unscathed or uncriticized in this book. Ourednik’s dry humor pairs well with sentences that are dense in their simplicity, that makes sense. For instance: “Psychiatrists said that in many people the First World War provoked traumas that had been previously hidden in the unconscious, and in the 1920s and 1930s the people started to be neurotic because they were not adapted to their inner or outer state, and in Europe in the 1960s, 25% of women and 15% of men were neurotic, and journalists called it the disease of the century. And in the 1970s the number of people suffering from depression also started to rise, and at the end of the century every fifth citizen of Europe was depress” (65). Every sentence in Europeana reads this way: biting, revealing, absurd, contradictory, a slap across an entire century’s big sweaty face.

2. Urs Allemann’s Babyfucker (Les Figues, 2010 but available now!): This is a book to talk about. This is a book you want to carry around with you, just so people can ask you what it’s about. Last week, as I was sitting at a cafe in South Bend, this slender volume lying on top of my usual stack of library books. It’s cover is a lovely yellow, it’s spine an unobtrusive pink. But the title! The title is what interests people most. So someone asks me: What’s that you’re reading? And I say: Babyfucker. Just like that. And that person responds: Hmm. There’s no follow-up question. I have to force their discomfort. I say: It’s a book about a man who fucks babies, or not. It’s this little Beckettian book, this man obsessed with the sentence, ‘I fuck babies,’ constantly repeating, ‘I fuck babies. That’s my sentence.’ Whether or not he actually fucks the babies is irrelevant to the reader, but to that person standing by your chair at the cafe, that’s the only question that matters. Here’s the thing, I haven’t even started touching the substance or the incredible writing in this book, but it’s all solid. This is an inadequate review of a truly stunning book, but I’ve only managed to do exactly what I’ve criticized that person at the cafe of doing: getting lost in the spectacle.

3. Shane Jones’s The Failure Six (Fugue State Press, 2009): I didn’t read this book last week. I read it today. This morning, in fact. Reminiscent of Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women, though the language does not jar radical displacement, this sick little fairy tale took me to a world without speech, a world of recycled bureaucracy, a place of tests and windows, foxes and leashes, men with green beards, extended onomatopoeia, geometric shapes everywhere, and certain execution. The thing is, Jones does all of this unassumingly. His writing is unadorned but somehow still poetic. This is a story about failure, but not just failing once. No, that would be too easy. These characters fail again and again, each time worse than the one before, each time more wary of punishment. I left this book feeling destitute, and that was ok by me. Shane’s gotten a lot of press lately because of the well-deserved love of his first book, Light Boxes, but people, don’t forget about this one! Love this one too! Shane makes me smile.

4. Jeff Clark’s Ruins (Turtle Point Press, 2009): [Note: I couldn't find an image for this book, which is lame, because it's gorgeous.] This slim volume of poetry is what I would want a volume of my poetry to look like, if I wrote poetry. First off, it’s hard cover, which seems like a rare artifact these days. The pages, some black some white, contain as many photographs as poems. But now to the poetry itself: many of the poems in this collection are conversations with other writers and artists, particularly the Surrealists. Clark’s poems cycle through repetition, each word carefully chosen, carefully placed. This is no surprise because Clark is also a book designer. He’s also got a lovely translation of Louis Aragon’s “Poem to Cry in Ruins.” If I knew more about poetry, I’m sure I’d say lots of smart things here, but alas, I’ll suffice to say I read & enjoyed this book a great deal and hope you will do the same.

5. Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquietude: Noah Cicero suggested I read this book. I don’t really remember how or why he suggested it (does context really matter?), but I read it and loved it. I’ve been told that I read the wrong version though. Published posthumously, this is a book of fragmented meditations on anything and everything but particularly loneliness. Though sometimes a bit too self-indulgent for my tastes, it’s a worthwhile read, for sure.

6. Mati Unt’s Things in the Night (Dalkey Archive, 2006): This is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Seriously, it seems like I’ve liked everything I’ve read this week, and yes, I have, but Unt’s book is the whole package: sophisticated concept, moral questioning, and the writing itself!! This novel begins simply: “My Dear, I feel I owe you an explanation. / First, I have to admit that I have always had an interest in electricity.” From there, readers follow the narrator as he tries to write a book on electricity, while Estonia (and the world as a whole) creeps steadily towards disaster. Unt showcases his writerly breadth, moving between forms and styles, each one poetic and ominous. I don’t want to give away too much, but I’ve never read a hand-job scene like the one in this book! This is a book about humanity: its glory and faults, aspirations and promise of failure, and of course, the people who remain, here, in pause, waiting.

7. Steve Tomasula’s TOC (FC2, 2009): In my last post about my readings, I made it a point to say that I wasn’t including any books I read for school, but in this case, I feel like it’s necessary for me to mention TOC. I’m teaching Tomasula’s DVD novel tomorrow for my fiction writing workshop, and I can’t say how much I love this book! It’s visually stunning, cutting edge like drawing blood (& to think: if the technology had been ready for him, Steve would have had this out a decade ago!), and conceptually masterful. People haven’t paid much attention to TOC, but you should! Buy it!

So that’s me. What have you been reading?

Nestled on an island off the Yucatan Peninsula is my sixth favorite vacation destination, Cozumel, Mexico. Cozumel is a fun, vibrant city with tons to do.  One of the most fascinating parts of the region, however, is only a 3 hour bus trip away.  On our first trip to Cozumel, we wanted to see some of the Mayan ruins in the area, so we booked an excursion to the Tulum Mayan Ruins. We were visiting Mexico at the end of June and it was hot. I’m talking 104. Fortunately, the bus was air conditioned.  We arrived at the ruins and were taken aback by the scale of it all. They really are an amazing achievement.  As we took in the grand vista, our tour guide told us that the air conditioned portion of the area was just around edge of the largest temple.  We walked over expecting a visitors center and gift shop, but we met with the most awesome view of the Caribbean some 150 feet below and a cooling breeze that dropped the temperature and humidity drastically.  When we returned to Cozumel four years later, we walked around the city and took in many of the sights and shops we missed on our earlier trip, since the excursion to the ruins takes all day.

The gem at the top of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, Mackinac Island is my fifth favorite vacation destination. We spent our 11th anniversary on the island tucked between the Upper and Lower Peninsulas. A five hour car ride and forty minute ferry ride from our home near Detroit, Mackinac Island is a true paradise not too far away.  We stayed at the Mission Pointe Resort and toured the island on a horse-drawn carriage.  Since only a few emergency vehicles are only allowed on Mackinac Island, getting around the island presents only three choices, walking, bicycling, or travel by horse.  We walked most of the time, but opted for the horse-drawn tour, since the island is pretty large, and it has been far too long since I navigated by bike.  Mackinac Island does boast a unique record which I don’t think will ever be broken. Highway M-185 circles the island, but since the only motor vehicles on the island are police, fire and ambulances, there has never been an automobile accident on the Highway, so it is the safest road in America.

(As usual pictures will be added once I’ve uploaded them)

After spending a couple of days catching up with friends in Hyderabad, I took the night train to Hampi, the old capital of the Vijayanagar kingdom. Once a city grand enough to invite comparisons to Rome by a 16th century Portuguese traveler, these days it consists of a small dusty village,  surrounded by miles of abandoned ruins.

Hampi is an interesting place to visit. It grows on you. The first day, still groggy from the overnight journey, I wandered about the village streets. The sights were familiar: children walking by full of smiles, saying hi, sometimes asking for a pen; souvenir salesmen and ayurvedic masseurs trying to lure you into their shops; and all around the boulder strewn landscape covered in the remains of the once great temples.

After visiting the three or four most important ones – the ones recommended by the guidebooks and consequently the ones where the tour buses gather-,  I’m tired as evening falls and feel a little ruined out. How much more can one really see and appreciate?

On the second day, though, I venture out further afield and all of a sudden I’m on my own. Vast temple complexes with monkeys clambering across crumbling gopurams, even vaster market places stretching out hundreds of meters into the green grass, and there’s only myself and the occasional caretaker.

That’s the thing about Hampi. You can roam around for days discovering new places never mentioned in any guidebook and only appearing as a few dots on a local map. The ruins line all the hillsides and valleys down to the smooth flowing river that continues to provide a lifeline to local population.

They navigate the currents in what appear to be upturned two-meter wide round baskets. There are signs warning of wily crocodiles, represented in full technicolor, and deadly whirlpools, but undeterred I take a trip upriver after the boatsman rubbishes the warnings. Even here the ruins are visible. We pass temples and hermits’ caves, which disappear each year  under the roaring monsoon tides. At one stage we’re caught out by a sudden downpour, but the boat turns out the be multi-functional as we go ashore and flip it over to create a makeshift shelter.

On my last day I cycle downstream along the river passing the remains of what once was a 400 meter bridge connecting the embankments. I’m trying to get to Anegundi on the left bank, but when I get to the site of the new bridge, which was due to open only this year, I find its two middle sections collapsed in the river. The scene is quiet. A few men amble around a foursome of concrete-pouring trucks, but evidently work has stopped since the accident.

On the opposite bank a massive slab of concrete slants at a 45 degree angle into the water. An old lady uses the convenient surface for washing clothes, slapping the cloth harshly against the road surface before rinsing it out in the passing current.

And just to make sure you stay alert in such peaceful surroundings:

As I park my bicycle in front of the archaeological museum, a man sitting in the shade of the empty ticket office takes four Rs. off me and gestures me inside. A few meters in, a security guard stops me. Where’s my ticket? I try to explain I didn’t get one and go out again, but the man is gone. I buy a ticket, an actual one, from the lady who’s suddenly appeared in the office. That’s India for you.

Naniwa-no-miya Remains, with the NHK building and Osaka Museum of History in the background

Long before the city of Osaka existed, there was an imperial capital called Naniwa. It first served as the seat of the emperor and his grand palace in 645, and for the second time in 744 (capital cities tended to move regularly as new emperors took power). Thanks to its strategic location, Naniwa developed into an important seaport for trade and cultural exchange not only between different regions of Japan, but with Korea and China as well. Even after the first permanent capital was established in 710 in Heijo-kyo (modern-day Nara), and in 794 in Heian-kyo (modern-day Kyoto), Naniwa acted as the seaport for imported customs and traditions that Japan integrated with its own to form the civilization we know as Japanese.
Besides sea routes, Naniwa was the trading hub for overland routes, much as it remains today. Militant Buddhist influence was be strong here, centering on the Honganji sect, but would finally be violently crushed by Oda Nobunaga in the late 16th century, and in the 17th century Toyotomi Hideyoshi would establish the great merchant’s capital of Osaka.
The name “Naniwa” remains in place names, such as Naniwa-ku (Naniwa Ward), Naniwa-bashi (a bridge on Nakanoshima island), Namba (the famous entertainment district, whose name is a modern reading of the same kanji characters (難波) for Naniwa).
Naniwa-no-miya, which was built two times on two different sites, was one of the grandest palaces in ancient Japan, and when its role as the imperial government center had ended, it served as a diplomatic meeting and lodging place for high-ranking overseas dignitaries visiting Japan. Only a small portion of Naniwa-no-miya remains, which can be seen in a small park adjacent to Osaka Castle Park. Next to the ruins is the Osaka Museum of History, which is the best museum in Osaka and one of the most enjoyable museums I have visited period. It is not only informative but engrossing, as it appeals not just to history buffs but average people who may not know anything about Osaka’s deep history. Additionally, you can enjoy a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the grounds of Osaka Castle and the Naniwa-no-miya remains from the tenth floor of this building. Both of these can be accessed from Tanimachi 4-chome Station (Chuo and Tanimachi Subway Lines).

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.

Buffalo, NY has a bad rap, it is one of those cities that evokes negativity whenever spoken about by people who never even set foot onto its wide tree lined boulevards, or grimy ghetto streets with wood paneled housing and shaky porches. I don’t know what images fill your head when I mention Buffalo, maybe the grazing Buffalo of upstate New York or the abandoned mills of Bethlehem Steel, maybe you think of the western terminus of the Erie Canal or of Buffalo as a suburb of Niagara Falls, that place you drive through to get to the falls, which you visit for about 15 minutes before retiring to the fast food and tourist establishments along Lundy street on the Canadian side of the falls.

I didn’t realize how much I missed Buffalo until I drove down Elmwood avenue today and marveled at the abundance of art stores, organic food establishments and hip funky music/coffee houses.

I then drove down a wide boulevard with a small park in the middle and wondered if the Buffalo haters had ever seen the houses here. Had they seen the color, the ornate woodworking attaching the roofs to the upper story windows? Had they seen the tal spires of the brown stoned churches? Had they seen the traffic circles with fountains in the middle?

Texas doesn’t have what Buffalo has, Buffalo has charm and character, it has beautiful old buildings, of the red brick industrial warehouse variety and of the art deco spires and gargoyle variety. Buffalo is one beautiful city, even the ghetto has charm. Rows of houses just stop for the random railroad tracks all leading to some abandoned grain elevator.

Don’t get me started on the grain elevators, Buffalo has more abandoned and unique grain elevators that Topeka, its quite beautiful to see the different designs and the peeling white paint. General Mills still has a large operation, but there are many more, smaller and larger grain elevators that appear to have been abandoned for 5 decades, weeds grow at the bases and railroad ties are scattered around. The Buffalo river and frozen canals leading all over the place past these behemoths create quite the scene, add the hundreds of railroad tracks and you get a n industrial photographers paradise, it doesn’t hurt that there are no neighborhoods around, which means safe wandering and no bums with syringes sticking out of the arms annoying you with change requests.

Downtown Buffalo is quite impressive in terms of architecture, only a few bland new skyscrapers compete with the countless older beauties. Old advertisements, neon signs and the trollies mix together to bring Buffalo alive, even though it is mostly abandoned. I think I thrive on the desolation and solitude of downtown Buffalo. It is quite cold out and a few stray people are walking around hands shoved deeply in their pockets heads down against the wind, with scarves fluttering about their faces, I drive by oblivious to the cold but thankful for it, the cold paints Buffalo as it should, an old city left over from an industrial heyday that has embraced its funky artsy citizens who need to have a way to escape the negative feelings that the media and non-residents feel toward them.

Visit my friends site virtual executive assistants

Voici un peu de nouveauté du côté de mes occupations dominicales, nous sommes allés dans un lieu assez connu de la Belgique, pas mal visité, mais hélas une partie n’était pas accessible ce jour là, dommage et tant pis pour moi… Mais bon j’ai quand même trouvé quelques petits recoins sympathiques malgré la destruction et l’obscurité… Je commencerai avec ces deux premières de la série pour ce bâtiment.

Lors de cette session je réfléchissais aussi à comment photographier la friche sans que ceci ne tombe dans le “vu et revu” sempiternelle phrase à laquelle j’ai droit de mon côté. Je comprends parfaitement, mais en même temps il n’est pas aisé de trouver la façon qu’il me convient de prendre en photo ce genre d’endroits, tout du moins pas tant que j’apprécierai y aller car je ne peux faire quelque chose de froid en parcourant ces lieux. Enfin même si avec le temps la façon d’appréhender les lieux change, je pense que la photographie de friches et de ruines est loin d’être une chose facile et qu’il n’est pas bon d’empêcher les gens de travailler à changer cela… Mes recherches avancent donc très lentement, mais je suis patiente même si c’est au péril d’autres choses…

The ruins at Désert de Retz were built on the eve of the Revolution, between 1774 and 1789 by François Racine de Monville.  They present a rich and playful, temporally complex example of the Romantic obsession with ruins, close to Schlegel’s famous observation, “the works of the ancients have become fragments; the works of the moderns are fragments at their inception” (quoted in Levinson, 1986: 10). With over 17 follies packed within just 35 acres of landscaped garden, Monville juxtaposed the ruins of a gothic church with an Egyptian pyramid, a decaying Greek temple, and a series of rustic altars.  Although Diana Ketcham might call the Désert an “architecture of fantasy” (1994: 1), it is a fantasy rooted in the figures and forms of architectural history and rehearses in stone what Panini and Piranesi achieved in paint and acid.

The Broken Column, Désert de Retz

At the centre of the garden lies what is known as ‘The Broken Column’ an enormous Doric column 55 feet high and 50 feet wide.  Inside, a spiral staircase connects 5 floors and approximately 20 rooms making Monville’s column a ruin that functions, a ruin in which to dwell.  The formal, antiquarian response to the column might be to follow the proportions of the Doric order, imaginatively reconstructing the 400-foot temple that the column suggests was once existent.  Nevertheless, the column demonstrates a demand for time, however gargantuan, fictional or fantastic; it demands time and a narrative explanation of its presence.

Cross-section view of the Broken Column

“Let us bring to our gardens the changing sets of the opera,” writes Louis de Carmontelle, contemporary of Monville and originator of the term ‘pay d’illusions’, “let us see there, in reality, what the most able painters could offer as decoration, all times and all places” (quoted in Bandiera, 1989: 83).   As an attempt to synthesize all times and all places, Monville’s pays d’illusions generates and discloses the narrative frames we impose upon objects of ruin.  The ruins are allegorical in Walter Benjamin’s sense, generating their allegorical content through, what Benjamin called, “the highly significant fragment, the remnant” (2003: 178).  The allegorical provocation rendered by Monville’s follies goes some distance in foregrounding their narraratological, semantic productivity.  It is the untimely nature of the ruin, an “untimeliness […] evident in how past, present, and future conspire to converge,”  that gives the ruin its allegorical force (Trigg, 2007: 131). The Broken Column and the follies that surround it stages a performance of this convergence; not only does the Column suggest a time of use and a past that could never have existed, but it wilfully confuses our attempts to divide the time of architecture according to notions of waste and want. Monville’s Column demonstrates the fundamental noncoincidence between the ruin’s outer appearance, the fragmentary distance between past, present, and future, and our narrative attempts to reconcile this noncoincidence.  The ruin demands an impossible narrative, an impossible reconciliation between these dispersed and converging times, disrupting our sense of the contemporary and the security of the ‘now.’  The Désert becomes spectral in Derrida’s sense, prompting the “disjointure in the very presence of the present, this sort of non-contemporaneity of present time with itself (1994: 25). If we make sense of ruins by imposing the temporal frames, the time of use and waste, for example, then Désert de Retz frames those frames and brings their plastic imposition to our attention.

Andre Breton's Surrealist Group, among the Ruins at Désert de Retz

So the time of ruin is a time that generates narrative.  We might explain some of the Romantic obsession with ruin by pointing towards ruin’s temporal malleability and intractability, its capacity to symbolise both the transience and endurance of material things.  The narrative multiplicity of ruins is a response to and translation of objects that seem, by their very nature, to lie in fragments.  We have seen how ruin-narratives do not simply resolve the rents and fissures of the ruin, but, by displaying their narratological tricks and tensions, these narratives can simultaneously display the fragile terms by which we compose and decompose meaning.  Indeed, the fabrication and projection of ruin puts the distinction between waste and want under particular scrutiny, disclosing how the time of architecture depends on whether buildings coincide with the projective time of human activity.  Whilst the ruin makes and narrates the passing of time, the making of ruins reveals how materiality is always matter both in and of our time.

[A longer version of this text was presented in June to the Romantic Realignments series, Oxford]

I was part of a family of at least three kids and a parent/parents. There was at least the big brother and a teenager sister, the rest of the siblings were younger.

For some reason the big brother, who studied in the university, should set a time bomb in their school! The whole family knew about it, but for some reason they wouldn’t stop him. It wasn’t like they completely liked the idea, but more like that they thought it has to be done….

So one evening that guy walked through the town to his school (it was quite far away from the towncenter where they lived), set the bomb there and ran back home by foot!

He was at home for good, when the bomb finally exploded. The bang was so loud, that even if the family lived many kilometers away I (I was the teenage sister at that point) held my ears and it still hurt and felt like my head was exploding too. A detail is that it happened about 8 PM.

Later it turned out, that the whole neighbourhood around the university had collapsed during the explosion, and the police didn’t have any clue who did it or why.

Some months (I guess) later when the worst sensation around the blast had calmed down, the big brother would strike again! This time to a neighbourhood on a quite narrow cape.

This time I was the big brother, and I saw myself walking through the city. First the (annoyingly) crowded and messy downtown, then along some forrest roads with quite few houses around them (he/I didn’t take the shortest way to the cape). Then he walked through the ruins around the university area… The colours were bright and saturated, even kind of glowing, and it obviously was autumn time. The time was around between 5 and 6 PM.

The I finally came to the cape, which consisted of beautiful wooden houses, mostly red with white details like the rails around the porches and balcony. The sea was glistening in the evening sun… and the whole sight was very beautiful. I thought that what a pity to blow it up, but for some reason I knew that I still have to do it.

In the end of the cape the houses where smaller and built very tightly next to each other. At this point the dream became less realistic, ’cause when I peeked inside the tiny houses (more like the size of a  playhouse) they rather looked like shelves with a lot of toys on them. One house had a lot of lego blocks in it, an other had piles of toycars. I left the bomb somewhere there and I don’t remember the moment clearly.

What I remember is that when I ran home I chose a different route than when I came, and it was A LOT shorter, it turned out that the cape was actually scarily close to our home and the whole downtown!

The downtown was still so crowded that it was hard to move forwards because of all the people. And all the people looked very random and different – for example one monk (a hindu or a buddhist?) walked by me in his orange cloak and bald head, looking like dalai lama or something.

Then I was at home and we were just waiting when the explosion would happen. It should happen at 6 PM, but it delayed for some minutes… then I woke up before it actually happened.

Ahh, the majesty that is Machu Picchu.  It’s no secret that Machu Picchu is a must see when visiting Peru, but what many don’t know is what treasures and gems await one at the site.

Huayna Picchu is just that.  For the avid hikers, it provides one of the best views of the ruins from within the archaeological site.  The trickiest part is that it’s also not the best kept secret.  They only allow 400 people a day up the mountain (200 from 7am-10am and 200 from 10am-1pm).  Many ambitious tourists rush to get their spots and it can fill up as early as 6am-7am.  The best way to do it is to show up early, reserve on the 10am spot and head back to explore the ruins before the crowds hit (around 11am it turns into Disneyland on crack).   It gets a little complicated for those on the Inca Trail (See Trickery on the Inca Trail).

Huayna Picchu is the mountain to the right of all the typical Machu Picchu photos (see below).

Huayna Picchu is the mountain on the right

The hike from the bottom to the top of Huayna Picchu is about 30 min. to an hour and I HIGHLY recommend it if you ever get the opportunity.Here’s a panoramic video I took from the top: