long goodbye…

An all-time favorite & friend of CUPtopia has passed away…Cy Twombly.

"Nini's Painting" from 1971 by Cy Twombly.

Lesson / Koan : Scribble something soon.

A national treasure is the only way to describe Cy.

BTW,

Cy’s utopia was one of endless historic & imaginative character.

CUPtopia’s staff has referenced many of Cy Twombly’s works in classes of both design & writing, as a model of inner peace.

Cy Twombly with his painting "1994 Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor)," at the Menil Collection in Houston in 2005.

NOTE :

Cy’s work & outlook will continue to influence many students & teachers alike.

One who just couldn’t understand or appreciate Cy’s work was Donald Judd.  ( Read the following quote from Judd’s narrow criticism of Twombly’s 1964 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. )

The artist and writer Donald Judd, who was hostile toward painting in general, was especially damning, calling the show a fiasco. “There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line,” he wrote in a review. “There isn’t anything to these paintings.”

Is it any wonder why Judd’s work is so popular still?…CUPtopia’s staff would argue that the words written by Mr. Judd in 1964 were truly a description of his own work, reflecting that lack of depth his sterile boxes embody.

in a nutshell…

The filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola cooked up an original screenplay he called “Megalopolis.”

Lesson / Koan : Micro gestures impact mega scales.

“It was a movie, in a nutshell, about a utopia – the idea that maybe the human species is so talented and so ingenious that we could at this point build life in the world that would be so exciting and great for everybody,” said the filmmaker.

BTW,

“I set the story in New York and it had a kind of archetype of a master builder, like a Robert Moses but an enlightened kind of character, and it was all on grandiose terms.”

The script for “Megalopolis” had dealt with time in an odd way because, said Coppola, “obviously when you are going to build a utopia it doesn’t happen in a weekend.“

A friend had given the director a book by Mircea Eliade, now out of print, to read because it dealt with similar issues.

“I read the quotes about time because time is essentially unreal. We are humans can think about the future as a concept, but there is no such thing as the future nor is there such a thing as the past because we are always in the present,” said Coppola.

The film version of ”Megalopolis” has not been made, and is on hold…just as the future is.

Eliade's portrait on a Moldovan stamp.

NOTE :

Mircea Eliade…was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them. In academia, the Eternal Return has become one of the most widely accepted ways of understanding the purpose of myth and ritual.

The term “hierophany” (from the Greek roots “ἱερός” (hieros), meaning “sacred” or “holy,” and “φαίνειν” (phainein) meaning “to reveal” or “to bring to light”) signifies a manifestation of the sacred. It occurs frequently in the works of the religious historian Mircea Eliade as an alternative to the more restrictive term “theophany” (an appearance of a god).

An endowed chair in the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School was named after Eliade in recognition of his wide contribution to the research on this subject.

 

 

walking tour…

This postcard from 1925 imagines future New York City, “The City of Skyscrapers.” Utopian New York of the 1920s.

A system of elevated trains, beautiful flying contraptions, and towering skyscrapers reaching toward the heavens.

Lesson / Koan : Tradition influences innovation…& Innovation reflects tradition.

Reserve side of the above postcard.

( text from reserve side of postcard )

FUTURE NEW YORK will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper was the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet high, the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high; and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all and rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan American Building is to be 801 feet high.

BTW,

90 years later in 2010 the only elevated train system on Manhattan is a park called the High Line.  Is a park the future?…or is there always a connection between the past and the future?  The imagery of the above postcard reveals the answers, but when a transportation system fails does it always have a reincarnation?

When something recent happens in New York…it does not mean it is the first time it has ever happened.  New Yorkers, just want everyone to think it is the first time.

The High Line is a 1.45-mile (2.33 km) elevated park which runs along the lower west side of Manhattan.

NOTE :

The Promenade Plantée (“walk with trees“) also known as the Coulée verte is a 4.5 km-long (2.8-mile) elevated park in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, France.

It is a rail trail, constructed on an abandoned 19th-century railway viaduct, which connected the Bastille area to the eastern suburbs of Paris, and ceased operation on December 14, 1969. Conversion to park took place between 1987 and 2000. The parkway runs from the Opéra Bastille (near the junction of Rue de Lyon and Avenue Daumensil) to the eastern city limits, ending up only a short distance from the Bois de Vincennes.

The Promenade Plantee was featured in the movie Before Sunset.