on the tube

on the tube at week's end,
hoping to forget five
days of portioned soul,
parceled out and auctioned off
for less than the asking price.
"who were we to sell it cheap?
where lifted we a finger
to form time gifted free,
now sullied spent and squandered?"

on running

on running: a picture of my life.
running after and running away,
running to catch and running from a
and back to a again
where is b and wherefore?
how profits me if faster?
who judges which the winner?
what of him who doesn't?
if filled with sixty seconds run
what minute's manhood have i won?
what manner of good will i have done?
on running: a picture of my life.

delays

perfectionism, late night work, moving house to oval
procrastinating things to say - excuses seldom noble.
timing is a funny thing, delays a notion stranger,
rhyming couplets mangle words, prose would make things plainer.

home by ursula meier

home - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1319569/

a tender portrait of the family in modernity.
blunt powerful use of silence.
evocative in its warm home, play and plausible siblings.
beautiful and baffling moments naked.
consolidated my contempt for the motor car, hope for the ideal of home and fascination with french cinema.

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home - http://thisishomeproject.blogspot.com/

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home - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2L3fc8mxk
home - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWu_1qmM0io

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home - Quoting Alexander quoting Buber:
"..in the imperishable language of the human heart house means my house, your house, a man's own house. The house is the winning throw of the dice which man has wrested from the uncanniness of universe; it is his defense against the chaos that threatens to invade him. Therefore his deeper wish is that it be his own house.."

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home - "Rent houses and sleep in them." Jer29v5

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home - Few things give me more joy than to form space in conversation with people to express the home they hope for.

All other things being equal if you could treehouse would you, houseboat would you, if it could be wood would you, stone would you, by the sea would you?

Does the exhaustion of individualism sufficiently account for the failure of imagination represented by suburbia?

What religious code of propriety dictates the aesthetic and personal as a less than valid pursuit?

People get the architecture they deserve, what you look for you will find, we do not have because we do not ask. What do we deserve? What are we looking for? Who are we asking?

Modernity does not have categories for home and homeness. What world view then has sufficient patience for the homes we mutedly hope for?

Home can be a bowl of soup, a warm embrace and a labrador. Home can be where your heart is, wherever she is, where they know your name. These are joy. But we forge a timid dichotomy. A book is both-and story and paper, a loved one is both-and body and soul. Home is more than memory, inheritance more than good intentions and L'Abri more than theology. There is pleasure in tracing the human touch on ancient steps, worn and storied. Home has an architecture and it is a valid pursuit of the christian imagination to paint it in all its simplicity and specificity.

reburb

http://www.re-burbia.com/finalists/

J sent me this link. The the entrants mean well. Can we affirm the motives of the competition, and laud their efforts to provoke the imagination? It's hard, this is cart-before-the-horse environmentalism, cake-and-eat-it environmentalism, sticky-plaster-on-cancer environmentalism. I'll sound like a cracked record if I say, we should address the root of suburbanisation, we drive out sprawling car-scaled suburbs on the basis of unwarranted notions of entitlement and exaggerated claims to 'need'. It is essentially a fear of specificity, an existential fear of Being in one place. If we answer this fear, people will pursue the healing of suburbia indigenously, choosing to farm their own plots, to green their own roads, to know and love their own neighbours and find their own energy together separate from the dream-selling imperial force of turbo-consumerism hyper-capitalism.The suburban problem is not a problem of form, it is a heart problem. rant rant.. There are good ideas there, the smallest scale are the most convincing.

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architecture must be as a tree

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