This compulsive desire for immortality, for a definitive immortality, revolves around a strange madness - the mania for what has achieved its goal. The mania for identity - for saturation, completion, repletion. For perfection too. The lethal illusion of perfection: hence these objects from which wear-and-tear, death or ageing have been eradicated by technology. The compact disc. It doesn't wear out, even if you use it. Terrifying, this. It's as though you'd never used it. It's as though you didn't exist. If objects no longer grow old when you touch them, you must be dead.

Baudrillard, J., The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Polity Press, 1994).

flukycoda

It might be a good moment to reflect that when I went to University in 1972 (as a smoker, but I'm better now), an average Penguin paperback cost the same (30p) as a packet of king-size cigarettes. In 2006, after tax after tax after tax has been piled on cigarettes and books remain zero-rated, the book costs 50% more than the fags.

Singapore GaGa is an engaging addition to the 'city film', which goes back to the 'silent' city symphonies, of which Berlin Symphony of a City (1927) is the best known. Other influential films in this style include the portraits of Tokyo contained in Chris Marker's Sunless (1983), Wim Wenders's Tokyo-Ga (1985), and Thom Anderson's assembly of 'found' footage in Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003, BIFF 2004). What links these otherwise disparate films, located on the boundary between experimental film and documentary, is the foregrounding of the city and its inhabitants as the primary subject and not merely as backdrops for the playing out of individual stories. In place of the rhythmic montage of the city symphonies, Tan Pin Pin has constructed a form of aural montage in an affectionately whimsical portrait of Singapore through its music and sounds, including announcements on public transport, eccentric street musicians, Madrasah school cheer squads, and avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who plays on a toy piano. Singapore GaGa continues Tan Pin Pin's fascination with Singapore's daily life, also evident in earlier award-winning films such as Moving House (2001), about compulsory exhumation of grave sites; Building Dreams (2002), about Singapore's architectural history; and 80km/h (2003), which establishes the time it takes to drive across the city at 80 kilometres per hour.

- programme notes for the upcoming Brisbane International Film Festival 2006

The basic construction technique involves filling sandbags with earth and laying them in circular courses that are corbelled near the top to form a dome. Barbed wire laid between courses prevents the sandbags from shifting and provides earthquake resistance. Ironically, it is the materials of war — sandbags and barbed wire — that bind together traditional earth architecture with contemporary safety requirements.

The system uses the timeless forms of arches, domes, and vaults to create single and double-curvature shell structures that are both strong and beautiful. In addition to providing earthquake resistance, the aerodynamic form resists hurricanes. The use of sandbags aids flood resistance, and the earth itself provides insulation and fireproofing.

From http://www.architectureweek.com/2004/1201/news_1-3.html

When I came to the United States to live as a teenager, I entered a world of profligacy and seeming wanton abandon of things in a take-make-waste production system, with a cradle-to-grave "throw it away" philosophy. I think this, in many ways, was the result of nuclear threat, something I did not live through ... When you sense that everything could end in an instant, you live as if there might not be a tomorrow. This became embedded in the culture - modern culture actually created geopolitical and physical threats (global terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, biological warfare) that could destroy us all tomorrow - so many industrialised countries have a "get it while we can" attitude rather than a continuous long-term prosperity in mind.

William McDonough
on economy, ecology and equity