Gordon Brown launches tv station
Gordon Brown attemps an end-run on the media gatekeepers by launching his own TV station, Number10T.
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Is Cy Twombly a better graffiti artist than Banksy?
Is Cy Twombly a better graffiti artist than Banksy? Yes he is, according to a harsh post by Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones, who wields Twombly as a bludgeon, beating back the Banksy-loving British art hordes.
I’ve published more articles about this unimportant graffiti and street artist than I care to count. I’ve generally been pretty harsh and yet the honest truth is that I don’t have an opinion about Banksy. I can’t believe that grown people find his work worth more than passing attention; he just doesn’t come onto my radar. What I really want to say to his admirers is - haven’t you people ever heard of Cy Twombly? He’s the only graffiti artist I care about.
A Twombly retrospective opens soon at Tate Modern; Jones hopes it won’t be a flop. He worries that Banksy’s popular appeal has desensitized the public to art that is
stupid, vulgar, trite and obvious…[while Twombly's] recent paintings…lusciously contemplate the beauty of Arabic script in what might be called a gesture of subversive orientalism, constitute perhaps the most intelligent response by an artist to the world’s current crisis.
Related: A conversation between Tate director Nicholas Serota and Cy Twombly.
All the takeout menus in Brighton. Scanned and searchable.
Two students in Brighton [wiki, official, map] got tired of hunting down menus from all the takeout restaurants in town so they scanned them all. Brightontasty was born.
The Anglophilic American suburb
For over a century, American developers and suburban-boosters have branded their communities with an easily-pronounced, “safe”, Anglophilic vocabulary:
Anglophilia runs deep in American culture, but it’s been particularly useful in helping Americans lay out a fantasy for how they want to live, a measure of wealth and success that’s guided urban planners for a century…
We anoint our suburbs with the names of invented British estates out of insecurity, nostalgia and a love of fantasy. America’s Buckingham at Queensbridges and Canterberry Crossings are, in the words of “Geography of Nowhere” author Jim Kunstler, “only part of the growing abstraction that is necessary to sell the suburbs. It’s a place without a past and without a future that leads to anxiety and depression. It’s through those cracks in the damage, that the marketers fill a void.”
But marketers fill this void haphazardly.
You know you’re in suburban Atlanta when the street names shift from memorializing an important local leaders–in the Civil Rights movement or otherwise–to being the imagined names of British people and their estates: Sir Charles Drive, Abbottswell Drive, Glenforest Drive, and most of the streets in Peachtree City.
Designing away climate change and fat people.
Britain’s health secretary, Alan Johnson, proposes the “10 eco towns already being planned by the government should now be built and designed to confront the UK’s obesity crisis.”
“We have to look at ways of improving the built environment, doing more to help people make physical activity a normal part of everyday life.”
Mr Johnson is leading a cross-government drive to put the eco towns concept at the cutting edge of the fight against obesity. Each new town is planned to house as many as 20,000 people. He has also been looking at tackling some of the least healthy cities in the north or London boroughs to see if progress can be made in redesigning existing towns.
Obesity is estimated to cost the UK £1bn a year and is projected to rise to £45bn by 2050.