shanghai blade four

More from Horst + Daniel Zielske in Shanghai

under the skin - nine

San Francisco Federal Building, Morphosis Architects by Stanley Greenberg

shanghai blade three

More from Horst + Daniel Zielske in Shanghai

orange skyline

I'll take Manhattan,
the Bronx, and Staten Island too
It's lovely going through
the zoo

It's very fancy
on old Delancey Street, you know
The subway charms us so
when balmy breezes blow
to and fro

And tell me what street
compares with Mott Street in July
Sweet pushcarts gently
gliding by

The great big city's a wondrous toy
Made for a girl and boy
We'll turn Manhattan
into an isle of joy

Tell me what street
compares with Mott Street in July
Sweet pushcarts gently
gliding by

The great big city's a wondrous toy
Made for a girl and boy
We'll turn Manhattan
into an isle of joy

I'll take Manhattan
I'll take Manhattan

shanghai blade two

More from Horst + Daniel Zielske in Shanghai

module nodes

Pietro Russo have designed the ecomo home to be compact for modern, simple living in collaboration with nature. The Architects design is based on basic sustainable, green design principles that offers a low-maintenance, modern, well-designed green housing alternative. The whole structure is a predesigned, prefabricated, customised home, offering numerous options in layout, size and finish through a modular system. The design consists of 3 units; sleep, play and live.

under the skin - eight

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Diller Scofidio + Renfro by Stanley Greenberg

parallel axis

Shinichi Ogawa + Associates created a house on a 1.5m grid module in every XYZ spatial axis. This site is at a corner of the new residential area in Kawasaki-shi, Kanagawa, Japan. The space is composed of a solid cube of 9.0m x 9.0m x 6.0m and a cubic void of 4.5m x 4.5m x 6.0m. The hall, children’s room, kitchen are laid out to surround the living-dining room on the ground floor. Meanwhile, on the first floor; the bedroom, walk-in closet, bathroom and court are are laid out to surround the double floor-height void which is 6.0m high. Each room of the interior space is connected through the void of the living room as well as letting the sunlight inside by cutting a geometric shape of the sky.

under the skin - seven

Phoenix Cardinal Stadium, Glendale, Arizona, Peter Eisenman by Stanley Greenberg

road leads back to you

Georgia
Georgia

the whole day through.
Just an old sweet song
keeps Georgia on my mind.
Talkin' 'bout Georgia

I'm in Georgia.

A song of you comes as sweet and clear
as moon light through the pines.
Other arms reach out to me.
Other eyes smile tenderly.
Still in peaceful dreams I see
the road leads back to you.

Georgia
sweet Georgia

no peace I find.
Just an old sweet song
keeps Georgia on my mind.
Just an old sweet song
keeps Georgia on my mind.

under the skin - six

Skirkanich Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects by Stanley Greenberg

dandelion motifs

Minimart's new kindergarten is located in the village Selo, Slovenia. The new building is located on the existing site of the old kindergarten and maintain contact with an adjacent building on the north-west. The Architects have created over 260 sq/m of internal space, two playrooms with common central space and services.

shanghai blade one

In this spectacular Megalopolis series, father and son photographers Horst (born 1946) & Daniel (born 1972) Zielske depict a new city born of the technologically and economically rampant twentieth century - a Shanghai between fiction and reality as the city of tomorrow, an immense city simultaneously full of the exhilaration and the nightmare of modern human progress at its most ambitious and unbridled. The fruit of a 6-year long project to document the city at this historic time of transition, these pictures have a ‘Bladerunner’ surreality and dynamism that cannot fail to speed the imagination. They are as awesome as the futuristic scene they so thrillingly document.

Based in Göttingen, Germany, Horst and Daniel Zielske have been working together in the field of photography for 12 years during which they have produced more than 20 books:

Selected Exhibitons

2006 Megalopolis Shanghai, Two-persons show at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany

2007 Megalopolis Shanghai, Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque, NM, USA

2008 Megalopolis Shanghai, Von Lintel Gallery, New York, NY, USA

since 1999 began der Werkreihe Deutsche Landschaften and Veduten 2002 - 2006 Corpus Megalopolis Shanghai 

creases and folds

For this project, Akihisa Hirata new intepretation of the house not as the act to produce an area like a box but as a folded surface created by the movement of the ground. Here, the Architects have found the balance of the pressure between the interior and exterior thus produces the bumped walls and roofs which creates one big volume with subtle division. As one approach the house, we can see the jostle between the inside and the outside in each rooms (i.e. the direct shape of roofs, diagonal protrusion created by external stairs as well as the distortion of space by the folded walls).

under the skin - five

Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Denver Art Museum, Daniel Libeskind

surprise grab

Excerpt courtesy of The Guardian, 10 May 2003 by Zoe Williams:

It would be fair to say that, at the moment, mainstream global culture is preoccupied with the aesthetic and sexual properties of the bottom. All celebrities, male and female, are evaluated on the quality of their behinds, and extraordinary competitions are launched between the arses of a brace of stars (I'm thinking of Kylie and J-Lo, obviously). Other stars speak of the arse stars in the most prolix, purple fashion: Justin Timberlake on Kylie ("I didn't just touch her butt, I totally copped a feel") is easily matched by Craig David on J-Lo ("Maybe she's voluptuous, but you wouldn't be complaining if she was lying naked with that arse in your face, would you?"). 

Try to imagine these nicely turned out young men talking about breasts like that - "I didn't just grope her tits, I totally squeezed!" They'd never be able to look the women in the eyes again (although, if they were breast men, maybe this wouldn't bother them). Suddenly, it is OK to objectify women by their buttocks. Normal, post-feminist standards still abide vis-à-vis all other body parts, but arses? Go for it, mummy's boys. Do your worst. 

The butt stars themselves, who ought to be able to see this competition as just another piece of manufactured chatter, have instead bought into it wholesale. Well, J-Lo has, allegedly trying to poach Kylie's bottom make-up artist. A Minogue "insider" was recently reported as saying, "This industry's not big enough for two bottoms of such magnitude. Kylie's make-up girl has found the elixir of arse maintenance, and there's no way she'll let that awful Lopez woman near it." I think you can probably make of that what you will. 

It is also OK to objectify men by their buttocks, Sex And The City-style, where men are judged by their behinds, presumably because attempts to judge them by their pecs and six-packs have fallen flat. This is the root of male buttock fixation - women objectify men by physical attributes to exact revenge for all the years that men have spent judging women in that way. You judge us by our arses, so we will judge you. 

But bottoms don't - certainly not in their modern, idealised incarnation - encapsulate very well the essence of either gender. Look at Kylie's bum: it is round and pert. Look at Justin Timberlake's: it is round and pert. It is possibly a bit hairier (I don't know). With this fascination, we are not rejoicing in our "otherness". We aren't viving la différence. I don't think that this is completely about sex, either. I think this is also about competition, about each gender taunting the other with an equally unattainable model of perfection. And by centring on the same body part, we make the battle cleaner. 

Advertising, which takes such pride in its up-to-the-minute cultural awareness, has been almost embarrassingly slow in this instance - although, I suppose, as the latecomer to the arse party, it proves the lasting significance of this obsession. The Sloggi billboard concept once had a whisper of texture to it - you may remember, they had a bunch of models in skimpy pants, cycling. This has now been jettisoned in favour of a far simpler and actually much more effective line-up: there is a girl with a watering can; there are other girls, all wearing thongs. The Renault Megane TV ad is similar in content. To the tune of I See You Baby (Shakin' That Ass), by Groove Armada, the camera segues from the large behind of the car to, er, some pretty behinds they just found about the place. Again, the "high concept" here is the arse without the face. The campaign for Velvet loo roll bathetically undercuts the arse supremacy with its "Love Your Bum" ads (these also feature nothing but a butt; the difference here being that the butts aren't perfect. They could be yours, and you must love them, anyway). 

Moving on from this frenzied arse appreciation to the next natural step, we come to a fascination with anal sex. This year is notable for two things: the longest and most depressing anal rape scene in cinema (Irreversible, directed by Gaspar Noé, features a nine-minute violation, which has divided critics - in so far as some of them deem it "necessary" and others "unnecessary"); and the appearance of the word "rimming" in mainstream literature. Adam Thirlwell's as yet unpublished novel, Politics, has an anal sex scene so honest and inept that it almost turns the experience into art. 

Martin Amis has been famous for his arse-centricity since 1980, when he contributed to Penthouse the short story Let Me Count The Times - it included the line, "Vernon sodomised his wife twice a year... on his birthday, which seemed fair enough, but also, ironically (or so he thought), on hers." Amis's forthcoming novel, Yellow Dog, is partly inspired by his own research into porn (or, in his 1980s terminology, "porno"), research that rapidly led him to the conclusion that porn these days doesn't stretch to any sex other than anal. "Pussies are bullshit," he famously reported in an article about porn(o) two years ago, an observation made by porn(o)-maker John Stagliano. In other words, pussies are for, well, pussies - real men prefer to watch it up the papa. But isn't this roughly the same as saying, "Women are pointless"? Isn't this, again, about competition? 

Now, John Stagliano and Buttman, the western world's second most popular arse-fixated porn star (after Seymore Butts), are one and the same person, so conceivably there is a bit of bias going on there. But the fact is, of the three most popular UK porn vendors on the internet, two name their number one bestseller as Omar's Arse-Fucking Anal House (the third names an Amateurs video). Which brings us to the question: how many people are doing this in their own homes? Figures are relatively scant - the most recent National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, in 2000, found that the practice of heterosexual anal sex among women rose from 6.5% in 1990 to 11.3% in 2000 (an increase of 73%) and among men from 7% to 12.3% (an increase of 75%). 

The anecdotal evidence is revealing. Deirdre Sanders, agony aunt on the Sun for 20 years, told me, "I'm not someone who usually goes in for big changes and trends, but I think the internet is having a huge effect on young people's sex lives. The availability of porn, the fact that they can be looking at it in their bedrooms, is affecting how younger people see sex. They see it much more as a commodity. The boys are coming at it with the idea that anything goes, not specifically anal but, yes, threesomes, foursomes, oral sex, anal sex... I wouldn't say it plays a huge part in my mailbag, because I only hear about it when there's a problem. But there's a lot of pressure on young women from young men to do different things, to swap things around." Caroline Buchanan, agony aunt at Now magazine, identifies a different factor, so old school that I'd forgotten about it. "I have heard that teenage girls are being pressured into anal sex, because they don't get pregnant that way. That's the thing I notice again and again: they're just not using contraception." 

Let's rewind a bit to what female commentators have made of the rise of the arse in terms of fashion and celebrity. Fashion editors are routinely quizzed on what, exactly, is going on here, and the majority of them see a positive message for women. Marie O'Riordan, editor of Marie Claire, has said on the matter, "We love a big bottom. Maybe this will be the trigger for a different fashion shape." And the journalist to whom she said it, Frances O'Toole, remarked, "And not before time. Any change in fashion that celebrates the way women actually are has to be for the good." This is the orthodoxy, that misogyny requires women to be thin, while a respect for women requires them to have curves. But the reality is not as simple: J-Lo's bottom is easily as unattainable as Kate Moss's upper arms; Kylie's arse is about as womanly as Jordan's breasts. The truth is, you would be crazy to see this backdoor mania as an empowering function of feminism. 

There is another, far more obvious misogynist top note to anal sex, and that is that many women don't like it. The bald truth of the matter is that men have an anal G-spot and women don't. Eschewing vaginal for anal, therefore, is just another way of saying to women, "Your pleasure is secondary, if not irrelevant." Which is fine, in its place, once in a while (on your birthday?), but not fine if the whole sexual culture is driving in that direction. Now, this is not the whole story: The Ultimate Guide To Anal Sex For Women, by Tristan Taormino, provides sound physiological reasons as to why anal sex shouldn't have to be a girl's own nightmare, as well as techniques for the proof thereof in the privacy of your own homes (I'm too squeamish to go into this; look it up on Amazon). But what kind of cultural trajectory is that? To idealise a mode of sex that effectively excludes one party, and then have to backtrack to re-include that party? Why not idealise a mode of sex that everyone can start off enjoying? 

Susie Bright, an American broadcaster and cultural commentator, argues that our obsession with anal sex has come out of the Aids crisis: "There was such a lot of talk at the height of Aids about the dangers of anal sex that straight people started thinking, 'Wow, it must feel really good for people to take such insane risks!'" I don't buy this, otherwise I'd have taken heroin to see why it screwed me up, and so would you. 

Here are some alternative thoughts from David Cronenberg, the dirty-minded visionary, apropos his film Crash: "It expresses that element of disconnection. It's a question of 'How do you have sex when you're not quite having sex with each other?' It felt right, getting both actors looking towards the camera and not at each other." Again, anal is dirty, "disconnected", raunchier than "loving" sex; but what is truly sexy about it? The disconnection, or the idea that the female is getting nothing from it? That the act is not one of union, but one of usage and solipsism? 

Anal retentiveness has been taken up as a shorthand for people who like to organise their desk items at right angles to each other, but the more faithful rendering of the anal character, as defined by Freud, is a person whose main energy in life is directed towards having, saving and hoarding money and material things. It's a stretch, I grant, to extrapolate from this that an anally-fixated society is one that, by definition, directs its main energy towards having money and material things. But it is certainly the case that we are hurtling towards the apex of capitalism, the most materialistic age man has known - and we are also fixated by Kylie's butt.

Now, it would make no sense to have this discussion without mentioning the racial aspects of arse-centricity. I don't want to say that black women have more sticky-out arses than white women - regardless of whether or not it's true, there is a racist overtone to the observation, since white culture has traditionally focused on the black female arse for racist reasons. David Marriott, author of On Black Men and lecturer in black cultural theory and critical theory at Queen Mary and Westfield, recalls an article headlined Black Venus in the early 1980s, "which reproduced lots of Old Master-type paintings and ethnographic images of black women, which were invariably obsessed with the butt. What was really being anchored was a racist view of the black physiognomy." 

That is, it was all just a (not very well) coded way of reinforcing the idea that black women were closer to simians - and, having more in common with monkeys, how could they not be savages? But though essentialism has largely been rooted out like the bindweed it was, it hasn't entirely gone away. I give you Sir Mix-A-Lot, the novelty rapper, and his song, Baby Got Back (you might know it as I Like Big Butts). The intro features a lot of scoffing about the size of a girl's behind ("It's so round", "I mean - gross"), and concludes that Becky is "just so... black!" And note the recent shocked newspaper coverage of tennis player Serena Williams' big, powerful body. 

The prime importance of the arse in black sexual identity is referenced constantly in rap music, from the really sexy, grubby lyrics of early 1990s hard men (like, er, Lil' Kim) through the more cutesy phrasing of Destiny's Child ("Can you handle my buttocks?" they effectively ask in Bootylicious), to novelty rappers. J-Lo, even though she is Hispanic and personifies that body ideal more than any other, is nevertheless associated through her music, and through her former relationship with Puff Daddy, with rap culture and thus with black culture. The contest between her (sticky-out) arse and Kylie's (tidy) arse is more than a piece o' fun concocted by the tabloids for our enjoyment. While on the one hand black culture is powerfully attractive to, and influential in, mainstream culture, there is a tendency in the white mainstream to water it down - to co-opt it, repackage it and send it back out with a white face. 

Kylie's timid behind is, in essence, a conduit for this very Anglo-Saxon message: defined arses are unarguably nice, but you don't have to be strident, or rapacious, or voluptuous, or black, to constitute a perfect model of femininity. You can be neat and small and white, and still be just as pretty as a picture. That's why it has taken on a life of its own, distinct from Kylie herself, just as J-Lo's has (with rumours of its having been insured for $1bn). In the inevitable backlash, fans on Kylie's website have said, "We're all bummed out. Put your ass to bed once and for all." Even while objecting to the arse, they still buy into the notion that it has a life of its own, and can stay in bed while the rest of Kylie goes out. 

This isn't to say that black culture has more respect and/or love than white culture for the "natural", assertive female form. As Marriott says, "It's relatively recent that the arse has become a designer object. But, for far longer, it's been a part of popular culture, of dancehall culture. There are black street cultures that have always engaged with this obsession. Why, I'm not sure, but I don't see anything in it other than extreme phallic fascination. Men want to penetrate women as if they were men. And certainly in Jamaican and ragga culture, their style of dancing would seem to go hand in hand with an intense homophobia. That's a very simple narrative: that what people most want, they most disavow. I don't see how it could be liberating for women to be put in that position of mediating homoerotic desire." 

This raises an interesting rejoinder to the widely held belief that a cultural fixation with bottoms and anal sex constitutes a kind of tacit acceptance of homosexuality. On the face of it, the more receptive the mainstream is to homosexuality, the more receptive it should be to anal sex. But anal sex with women is not necessarily a means of signalling general acceptance of anal sex as a modus operandi. It is, if you take the Jamaican example, a means of marginalising homosexuality still further by appropriating sodomy for heterosexual sex. In the same way that white culture absorbs black sexual imagery, remodels it and sends it back out in the shape of Kylie, so straight culture absorbs gay practice, grafts it on to heterosexual couplings in which 50% of the group isn't, by consensus, enjoying itself, and sends it back out in the shape of Bridget Jones's Diary (you no doubt remember the scene in which Renée Zellweger says to Hugh Grant, "What you just did is actually illegal in several countries." "You", not "we", of course). This is not about acceptance and belonging; it's about perceiving a threat, an otherness, then milking it down and saying, "Well, it's fine the way we do it, but you're still weird." 

Where ragga culture has arse-centric dancing, middle-American culture has Jackass, which focuses on the arse to an absurd degree. You may or may not have seen the movie, in which good-looking, articulate young men seek to hurt themselves in wholly revolting ways. They shoot metal pellets into their own stomachs and have bruises that describe whole continents on their bellies. They paper-cut their lips and between-finger areas: it's enough to make you sick. They make projectiles of themselves, to fire off every conceivable roof. And then one of them sticks a toy car up his arse, in a condom (the detail of the prophylactic is in itself extraordinary, since they take no precautions against pain or infection in any other stunt). And one of these guys, Steve-O - who has already stuck his head in a vat of jellyfish and then poured his own urine over his face to ease the exquisite pain - won't do it because his parents would be "disappointed". And the car-guy makes such a girlie fuss -"Ooh, this is so uncomfortable. Oh, I hate this"; this from a man who's jettisoned himself down a busy road on a shopping trolley - when he goes for an x-ray. 

And you cannot help conclude that, unlike any other stunt, the pain here is not physical. And the shock that they're confronting, unlike in any other stunt, is not physical. The format is to unleash shock and awe on their audience for the extravagant, imaginative pain and the untold risks they're prepared to take - and the most painful it gets is the humiliation of having something up your arse; and the greatest untold risk is that you might look as if you're enjoying it. 

Like any change in social mores, one assumes the arse thing is a move forward. One assumes that the deification of the lady arse is a blow for feminism, for womanliness. One assumes that the chorus over J-Lo's butt is a blissful union of black and white body ideals. One imagines that the rise and rise of anal sex is striking out in the direction of sexual liberation, of understanding, of the breaking down of barriers. One hopes that the day everyone has his and her brown wings will be the day humanity realises, and rejoices in, its proper urges. And all this adds up to a nice theory - but there's a crack in it.

we'll fly away

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away

If you can use some exotic booze

There's a bar in far Bombay

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away

Come fly with me, let's float down to Peru

In llama land there's a one-man band

And he'll toot his flute for you

Come fly with me, let's take off in the blue

Once I get you up there where the air is rarified

We'll just glide, starry-eyed

Once I get you up there I'll be holding you so near

You may hear angels cheer 'cause we're together

Weather-wise it's such a lovely day

You just say the words and we'll beat the birds

Down to Acapulco Bay

It's perfect for a flying honeymoon, they say

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away

Once I get you up there where the air is rarified

We'll just glide, starry-eyed

Once I get you up there I'll be holding you so near

You may hear angels cheer 'cause we're together

Weather-wise it's such a lovely day

You just say the words and we'll beat the birds

Down to Acapulco Bay

It's perfect for a flying honeymoon, they say

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly

Pack up, let's fly away!!

rain no more

Love ain't gonna let you down no more. Waiting here surrounded by white linen and the deafening traffic of thoughts, I feel secure. Each crease on my face is a product of happy moments. No one will ever do. The hope and plans I've made that once I thought were shattered and lay barren have now burst with activity. The choppy waters and the overcast weather I'm navigating has a definite direction now, since I have found my compass. Speak to me silently, surrender. It's ok. You have to give up the life you planned and find the life that is waiting for you. We all should...

sneek peek

Come on, we all know what a bikini is...if there is anyone out there who needs an introduction, well...a bikini is a women's swimsuit with two parts, one covering the magnificent breast and the other, the groin (aka the perfume garden - more about this on another post) and, optionally, part or all of the buttocks, leaving an uncovered area between the two. Damn! How did I manage to write it in such a technical format?! It is often worn in hot weather, while pretending to swim or sunning. 

Predecessors of the bikini date back to antiquity in Çatalhöyük and the Greco-Roman world. There have been a few artwork dating back to the Diocletian period in Villa Romana del Casale that depicts women in garments resembling bikinis in mosaics on the floor (pic above). The images of ten women, exercising in clothing that would pass as bikinis today, are the most replicated mosaic among the 37 million colored tiles at the site. Archeological finds in Pompeii shows the Roman goddess Venus wearing a bikini. A statue of Venus in a bikini was found in a cupboard in the southwest corner in Casa della Venere, others were found in the front hall. 

The groundwork for the modern bikini began to be laid in 1907, when Australian swimmer and performer Annette Kellerman was arrested on a Boston beach for wearing a form-fitting one-piece swimsuit, which became an accepted beach attire for women by 1910. In 1913, inspired by the introduction of women into Olympic swimming, designer Carl Jantzen made the first functional two-piece, a close-fitting one-piece with shorts on the bottom and short sleeves on top. By the 1930s, necklines plunged at the back, sleeves disappeared and sides were cut away. Then, the fun began with new materials latex and nylon and by 1934 the swimsuit started hugging the body and had shoulder straps to lower for tanning. 

It wasn't until a French (of course it is!) engineer Louis Réard and fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris in 1946 that made it modern. Réard, a car engineer was running his mother's lingerie boutique near Les Folies Bergeres in Paris and Heim was working on a new kind of beach costume. It comprised two pieces, the bottom large enough to cover its wearer's navel. In May 1946, he advertised it as the world's 'smallest bathing suit'. Réard named his swimsuit the 'bikini', taking the name from the Bikini Atoll. Réard sliced the top off the bottoms and advertised it as 'smaller than the smallest swimsuit'. All this is good and well but Réard could not find a model to wear his design and ended up hiring a nude dancer, Micheline Bernardini, to wear his piece That bikini, a string bikini with a g-string back of 30sq/in of cloth with newspaper type printed across, was introduced on July 5 at a public pool in Paris. After that, its all history...

docking dunes

Mayslits Kassif Architects won the open competition for the regeneration of Tel Aviv Port public space. The port management's new vision for the regeneration includes public space renewal and the restoration of the port’s old hangars. The Architects viewed the project as a unique opportunity to construct a public space which challenges the common contrast between private and public development, and suggests a new agenda of hospitality for collective open spaces. The design introduces an extensive undulating, non-hierarchical surface, that acts both as a reflection of the mythological dunes on which the port was built, and as an open invitation to free interpretations and unstructured activities.

under the skin - four

Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Daniel Libeskind

under the skin - three

Stata Center, MIT, Frank O. Gehry by Stanley Greenberg.

under the skin - two

Hearst Tower, New York, Norman Foster by Stanley Greenberg.