In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, Michael Diaz constructed an impromptu memorial in Manhattan for his missing brother Matthew. It consisted of a Payless shoebox holding a pair of worn black shoes, neatly tied. The top of the box, propped up, served as a kind of headstone. A verse from the Gospel of Mark [...]
As I left the theater, having just seen The Tree of Life, a woman waiting in line to see it asked, “How was it?” Awesome! I said, just as another patron declared, Awful! And that pretty much sums up how Terrence Malick’s provocative new movie has been received.
Soon enough, official photographs of the dead Bin Laden will be released into cyber perpetuity. Phony documents have already shown up online. Given our “chronic voyeuristic relation to the world,” as Sontag described it, not looking at the postmortem imagery will be nearly impossible. I wonder how they will be received, since no one believes [...]
Luminous Transportations, installation by Jo Yarrington, Marquand Chapel, Yale Divinity School
A third-generation stone carver and calligrapher, Nick Benson (b. 1964) creates elegant hand-carved tombstones and architectural lettering for public buildings, memorials, and monuments. He owns and operates the John Stevens Shop, a historic stone carving establishment in Newport, Rhode Island. The shop was run by eight generations of Stevenses until 1927 when it was purchased [...]
Cesar Pelli was born in 1926 in Tucumán, Argentina. After graduating from the University of Illinois, he worked, most notably, in the offices of Eero Saarinen and at Gruen Associates. In 1977 he became Dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University and established Cesar Pelli & Associates in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1995, [...]
