Vienna & Budapest, Socialism and Nationalism on the Danube

"...some of the city’s leading architects and thinkers — including Loos, Josef Frank, and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, along with sociologist Otto Neurath — argued for fundamental change in the way the city was organized. Squatter settlements were clustering on the outskirts, and these self-organizing spaces suggested the possibility of a new kind of city in which workers would construct their own environs, low-rise and homely but also modern, with a closeness to nature and an anarchic independence that would be impossible to achieve in inner-urban tenements. This fleeting vision was quickly rejected by the Social Democratic party that was elected to power in 1919 and ran Vienna — no longer the glittering imperial seat but merely the impoverished capital of the new Republic of German-Austria — as an Austro-Marxist city-state until the mid 1930s, when it was overthrown by the rising fascists in the years before another world war. Confronted with an acute shortage of good housing, and keen to respond quickly, the new leaders initiated instead what they argued was the more pragmatic solution of creating dense communal housing on infill sites throughout the metropolis. The Social Democrats may not have been radical but they were embattled. Even today this is evident in the architecture of the apartment blocks — the Gemeindebauten, or “municipally built” housing— that were constructed from the mid 1920s to the mid ’30s. These were not simply tenements: they were monumental tenements, stretching over entire city blocks, following the local model of the Hof-Haus, or perimeter block."

The Third Man

Illustration:IAEA, UN Ball. Hofburg Imperial Palace. Vienna, Austria.

Illustration: The Thompson Mesquita group.. Daniel Mesquita & Enrique Thompson (the one on the right..I forgot the name:) sorry...he was just jamming) , playing at Cafe Kreiski one night around September 2013. Vienna, Austria.

...worth to watch! a mesmerizing movie..."The Third Man". showing post-war Vienna, was the most popular movie at the British box office (and in other countries) for 1949...but In Austria, the film ran for only a few weeks...built on the aesthetic foundations of german expressionism the steady diagonal shots add a wonderful graphic tension to the whole plot. graham greene based the character of harry lime on british double agent kim philby, who was greene's superior in the british secret intelligence service. The famous scene at cafe mozart was shot somewhere else..but greene loved to spend part of his day writing in there anyway. Orson welles was absent from the shooting set most of the times leading the director to replace him with doubles on most of the "shadow" scenes including the one from the movie's poster...but welles improvised this most famous line in the movie: " HARRY - in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michaelangelo - Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance...In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?...The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly." (...but actually the cuckoo clock was a product of germany's black forest area and the swiss at the time of the borgias were the most fierce warriors in europe )

chicas...

Killing Us Softly-Jean Kilbourne

http://www.achillecastiglioni.it/it/bionotes.html

sem titulo...

http://www.bonluxat.com/d/achille-castiglioni.html

Achile Castiglione

http://www.evanizer.com/castiglioni/castiglioni.html

O Senhor Vento

Barry Schwartz and "The Paradox of Choice"

In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice , Barry Schwartz tackles one of the great mysteries of modern life: Why is it that societies of great abundance — where individuals are offered more freedom and choice (personal, professional, material) than ever before — are now witnessing a near-epidemic of depression? Conventional wisdom tells us that greater choice is for the greater good, but Schwartz argues the opposite: He makes a compelling case that the abundance of choice in today’s western world is actually making us miserable.

Infinite choice is paralyzing, Schwartz argues, and exhausting to the human psyche. It leads us to set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, who and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too much choice undermines happiness.

Schwartz’s previous research has addressed morality, decision-making and the varied inter-relationships between science and society. Before Paradox he published The Costs of Living, which traces the impact of free-market thinking on the explosion of consumerism - and the effect of the new capitalism on social and cultural institutions that once operated above the market, such as medicine, sports, and the law.

Both books level serious criticism of modern western society, illuminating the under-reported psychological plagues of our time. But they also offer concrete ideas on addressing the problems, from a personal and societal level.

Primavera

Luc Ferry - Environnement

Selon le philosophe contemporain Luc Ferry, il existe deux écologies. L'une privilégie la nature ("deep ecology") et estime que celle-ci a une valeur intrinsèque , l'autre ne considère la nature que dans sa relation avec l'homme ( écologie environnementaliste). Le seconde , qui est humaniste, est plus modérée et préférable.
L'une et l'autre demandent évidemment que l'on prenne ses distances à l'égard des idées cartésiennes:
"Si l'animal n'était qu'une machine, comme le pensent les cartésiens, la question de ses droits ne se serait jamais posée. Ce qui peut éveiller à son propos le sentiment d'une obligation, au-delà même de la compassion et de la pitié qui relèvent de la simple sympathie, c'est le caractère non mécanique du vivant qu'il incarne. [...] Bref, tout se passe comme si la nature, dans l'animal, tendait en certaines circonstances à se faire humaine, comme si elle s'accordait d'elle-même avec des idées auxquelles nous attachons un prix lorsqu' elles se manifestent dans l'humanité.
[...] Car c'est bien la nature elle-même qui fait signe vers des idées qui nous sont chères, et non pas nous qui les projetons en elle: à l'encontre de ce que pensent les cartésiens, il semble raisonnable d'admettre que les cris des animaux qui souffrent n'ont pas la même signification que les sons égrenés par le timbre de l'horloge, que la fidélité du chien n'est pas celle de la montre. De là le sentiment que la nature possède bien cette fameuse valeur intrinsèque sur laquelle s'appuient les "deep ecologists" pour légitimer leur antihumanisme (1. Mais d'un autre côté, et c'est là ce qu'ils manquent, ce sont les idées évoquées par la nature qui lui donnent tout son prix. Sans elles, nous n'accorderions pas la moindre valeur au monde objectif. Bien plus: c'est parce que la nature, souvent, va à l'encontre de telles idées, parce qu'elle est aussi génératrice de violence et de mort, que nous lui ôtons aussitôt la valeur que nous lui attribuions l'instant d'avant, lorsqu'elle nous semblait belle, harmonieuse, ou même, dans l'animal, intelligente et affectueuse."