Ines Salpico @isalpico - Tumblr Blog

The Colour of Words

I was one of the privileged few to watch the new copy of The Colour of Pomegranates at the Barbican on October 21st, presented by composer Julian Anderson. This is undoubtedly one of the most visually striking films ever made and it is a joy to see it restored to its full splendour It is also now possible to get it on DVD but nothing can replace a full-screen immersion in Sergei Parajanov’s masterpiece.

#cinema #film #sayat nova #Barbican #poetry

O Menu em Português, please!

Torna-se cada vez mais comum em Lisboa, nesses eixos do turismo de Lisboa (Belém – Terreiro do Paço – Santa Apolónia; Baixa – Chiado – Bairro Alto – Estrela; Rossio – Castelo – Martim Moniz –Intendente) ao cidadão nacional e comum apetecer-lhe um café e ser primeiro saudado em Inglês coçado e com um menu em Inglês. São também cada vez mais os exemplos de marcas portuguesas com embalagens exclusivamente na língua do outro enorme que não é Camões. Ora senhores, para quem turista não é, isto faz alguma comichão e questiona que é feito de uma cidade chamada Lisboa agora que uma certa Lisboa é destino turístico e pouco mais que isso. Lisboa já tem um parque infantil! Patrocinado pela EasyJet. Tendo vivido seis anos em terras Catalãs percebo agora a intransigência – por vezes rude é certo – como forma de defesa e preservação face a uma invasão algo hostil: ‘Ho sento, no parlo l’anglès!’ E o senhor turista que use o smartphone para traduzir e aprender um bocadinho do dialecto – língua, senhores, língua! – local. (A deriva nacionalista catalã talvez tenha passado menos pelo que se passava em Madrid e mais por um clima de invasão interna.) Mas os Portugueses, por um lado não têm – para o bem e para o mal – a intransigência catalã e, por outro, têm bastante mais talento para as línguas. Logo, welcome, bienvenue, bienvenido e estamos aqui para os servir.

#lisboa #linguaportuguesa

Suicide unnoted (fanatic scholars on a Friday night)

“Is this London in the 90’s?” asked Simon Critchley, giggling perhaps less ironically than what he tried to convey, after letting a Lacan quote slip into his lecture last week at the RCA. Crithley was presenting his latest book, “Notes on Suicide”, a beautiful print from Fitzcarraldo Editions.

It certainly wasn’t London in the 90’s: if Lacan is quoted awkwardly Freud is quoted (still and always) freely and with a strange reverence. Most importantly, Alain de Botton is the elephant in the room and everyone is secretly wondering how much nicer a room at The School of Life must be. There would be drinks on a Friday night like this…. And Christmas is coming and Botton will be cashing in again with the paperback versions of The Consolations of Philosophy, Art as Therapy and The Architecture of Happiness (this one particularly hurts) selling like croissants…

#philosophy #suicide

Living always on the edge. Thelma & Louise style.

The Prey’s Hunt

The quest for a flat in London

Apart from exhaustion and a not so slight aversion to real estate brokers, a likely outcome of hunting for an apartment in London is first hand knowledge of the city’s evolution over the past hundred or so years. For an enlightening crash course on demographics, infrastructures, transportation, planning, building standards and urban ethnography do leave lecture rooms and put textbooks down. Go online and schedule some viewings. It’s effective and fascinating. You’ll also get incredibly fit. “Moving to London” is a rather flexible statement, both conceptually and territorially. The way the city evolved through low-rise extension rather than the center’s densification will see you potentially cover the area of 1,569 km2 that is Greater London. Transportation within and between each of the thirty-two boroughs is not always easy or seamless. Needless to say that the lower your budget is the more ready you’ll need to be centrifuged to areas further from the center. At least that will certainly make up for not affording a gym subscription.

So what is this Greater London that spreads shamelessly beyond the caricature that tourist maps turn out to be? Endless rows of small Victorian townhouses split into smaller flats, with no water pressure and very little insulation. Where once a working family lived you can now fit two or three young couples (not necessarily coupling) of young professionals. Endless two and three bedrooms shared by graduates in their 20’s, 30’s and – yes – 40’s. True autonomy postponed, denied. Grease accumulated in pans, humid clothes hanging semi washed. Because it’s simply not worth it: it’s not worth cleaning, it’s not worth washing, it’s not worth caring. This will never be a home. There’s no room for commitment. Homes, as jobs as relationships. The lives of these young adults tells a tale of limbo and detachment. Invading their privacy as a prospective tenant, they don’t seem bothered, just indifferent. You cannot help fearing that those same pans will be in those same sinks six months from now, while you are then the subject of observation. You think that of course not, you’ll wash your towels and do the recycling. You will not need to sublet all the rooms. But so did they. Spanning from the late 70’s to the buildings now under development what you see is fast development and/or reconversion to maximize profit. The idea of the urban entrepreneur that would regenerate new areas of the city by commitment to strategy and quality seems strange and remote. Developers would argue that building regulations don’t help. That if you have strict rules on building height what else can they do except squeeze as many floors, with comical low ceilings, within what regulations allow. (A good and sad example - image below - was a warehouse reconversion in which the beautiful windows, wide and tall, were split by the slab that allowed two floors to fit what would otherwise be an airy high-ceiled space. I could touch the ceiling with a half stretched arm.) But regulations don’t account for the use of the cheapest of materials. Ikea shelves and cupboards come to mind: those you’ve assembled, disassembled and tried to assemble again and will never stand quite stable again. Forever wiggly, unable to fake the solidity of Scandinavian design. Most of these apartments are Ikea shelves. Real estate websites are the Ikea catalogue. It all looks so shiny, luminous, spacious, clean. Then you’re faced with the real thing.

#london #architecture #gentrification #irony #barbican #trellicktower #real estate

World Wars accidental modernism. Ness Battery in the outskirts of Stromness, Orkney. It it weren’t for that Corbu slip Louis Kahn could’ve claimed authorship.

#architecture #orkney #modernism #stromness

Not quite yet Spring....

#london #spring #winter

Icons in abundance... The Ramones... Blondie.. Iggy Pop... David Bowie... all captured by the lenses of Blondie's Chris Stein while history was being made. Chris Stein/Negative: Me, Blondie, and The Advent of Punk at the Somerset House

We all know, in our flesh, of the cathartic and magical power of fire. Something primal and visceral that, gathered around burning flames, puts us face to face with our fears and dreams: the ghostly nature of shadows that made those childhood nights so exciting; the slow metamorphosis of wood into ignited cinder that in adulthood empties the mind of the nonessential and allows one to find a thread of the absolute. Alcohol usually helps. With or without other aiding substances, the sight and murmur of flames have a meditative quality that removes the superficial clutter of the quotidian and lets the fundamental emerge. Around a fire everyone becomes a philosopher.