Large Wall Art Quotes

Start on clavicle. Remove middle third. Control and divide subsc art and vein. Divide large nerve trunks around these as prox as poses. Then come onto chest wall immed anterior and divide Pec maj origin from remaining clav. Divide pec minor insertion and (very imp) divide origin and get deep to serrates anterior. Your hand sweeps behind scapula. Divide all muscles attached to scapula. Stop muscle bleeding with count suture. Easy! Good luck. Meirion

So, it wasn’t until I was living in Mexico that I first started enjoying chocolate mousse. See, there was this restaurant called La Lorraine that became a favorite of ours when John and I were living in Mexico City in 1964–65. The restaurant was in a beautiful old colonial period house with a large courtyard, red tile floors, and a big black and white portrait of Charles de Gaulle on the wall. The proprietor was a hefty French woman with grey hair swept up in a bun. She always welcomed us warmly and called us mes enfants, “my children.” Her restaurant was very popular with the folks from the German and French embassies located nearby. She wasn’t too keen on the locals. I think she took to us because I practiced my French on her and you know how the French are about their language! At the end of each evening (yeah, we often closed the joint) madame was usually seated at the table next to the kitchen counting up the evening’s receipts. Across from her at the table sat a large French poodle, wearing a napkin bib and enjoying a bowl of onion soup. Ah, those were the days… Oh, and her mousse au chocolate was to DIE for!

Pay to go inside Neruda's home A body lies there with no dome. But right there in the front hall Lean a fairy against the icy wall. Oh Endless enigmas had the bard! Nice and large and calm backyard Ends In the middle of a rare room Rare portrait of revelishing gloom. Up climbing at the weird snail stair Does make you grasp for some air. And there's a room with bric-a-brac: Old and precious books all in a pack. Dare saying what I liked most of all? Enjoyed seeing visitors having a ball!

And so we have…this critical problem as human beings of seeing to it that the mythology—the constellation of sign signals, affect images, energy-releasing and -directing signs—that we are communicating to our young will deliver directive messages qualified to relate them richly and vitally to the environment that is to be theirs for life, and not to some period of man already past, some piously desiderated future, or—what is worst of all—some querulous, freakish sect or momentary fad. And I call this problem critical because, when it is badly resolved, the result for the miseducated individual is what is known, in mythological terms, as a Waste Land situation. The world does not talk to him; he does not talk to the world. When that is the case, there is a cut-off, the individual is thrown back on himself, and he is in prime shape for that psychotic break-away that will turn him into either an essential schizophrenic in a padded cell, or a paranoid screaming slogans at large, in a bughouse without walls.

The impotence of liberal humanism is a symptom of its essentially contradictory relationship to modern capitalism. For although it forms part of the ‘official’ ideology of such society, and the ‘humanities’ exist to reproduce it, the social order within which it exists has in one sense very little time for it at all. Who is concerned with the uniqueness of the individual, the imperishable truths of the human condition or the sensuous textures of lived experience in the Foreign Office or the boardroom of Standard Oil? Capitalism’s reverential hat-tipping to the arts is obvious hypocrisy, except when it can hang them on its walls as a sound investment. Yet capitalist states have continued to direct funds into higher education humanities departments, and though such departments are usually the first in line for savage cutting when capitalism enters on one of its periodic crises, it is doubtful that it is only hypocrisy, a fear of appearing in its true philistine colours, which compels this grudging support. The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the ‘human’ that present bourgeois society can muster. The ‘unique individual’ is indeed important when it comes to defending the business entrepreneur’s right to make profit while throwing men and women out of work; the individual must at all costs have the ‘right to choose’, provided this means the right to buy one’s child an expensive private education while other children are deprived of their school meals, rather than the rights of women to decide whether to have children in the first place.

Beautiful Florence has all seven of the fundamental things a city requires for perfection,” the essayist Benedetto Dei wrote in 1472, when Leonardo was living there. “First of all, it enjoys complete liberty; second, it has a large, rich, and elegantly dressed population; third, it has a river with clear, pure water, and mills within its walls; fourth, it rules over castles, towns, lands and people; fifth, it has a university, and both Greek and accounting are taught; sixth, it has masters in every art; seventh, it has banks and business agents all over the world.

Sudenly Garge spring up and walk to the wall to admire some modarn art hanging on Frank and Estele Catandas wall. Hes impressed. Frank and Estele have always had a traditienel sensibility when it come to aesthetic matter's. For as long as he knew it, this space on the wall was ocupied by a Normen Rockwell print of a smileing child with a cast on his arm eating a handful of bird seed out of the hand of the postman. But now its replace with this minimelist art work, a large black rectangle. He make out hes bald reflectien in the imposibly smooth black surfece. It look like something that should be hang in the Moma (Museum Of Modarn Art). "This is beauteful," Garge remark. "It seem like a stark comentary on the end of art. Who designe this?" "Not art," Frank go. "Thats a televisien.

The art world assumed an air of polite remove from the activities of the K Foundation from then on in, and it soon became apparent that no suitable gallery was going to host their inaugural exhibition. This was called Money: A Major Body of Cash, and largely consisted of what money the pair still had from The KLF years nailed to things. The key piece was called Nailed To The Wall, and consisted of a million pounds in fifty pound notes nailed to a board. The reserve price for this was going to be half a million pounds. The purchaser could therefore double their money by simply taking it apart. If they hung it on the wall, however, the value of the notes would decrease over time, but the value of the art might well increase. The exhibition, then, raised many thorny issues about the relationship between art and money. Or at least it would have done, if a gallery had been found to put it on.

Men at the close of the dark Ages may have been rude and unlettered and unlearned in everything but wars with heathen tribes, more barbarous than themselves, but they were clean. They were like children; the first beginnings of their rude arts have all the clean pleasure of children. We have to conceive them in Europe as a whole living under little local governments, feudal in so far as they were a survival of fierce wars with the barbarians, often monastic and carrying a far more friendly and fatherly character, still faintly imperial as far as Rome still ruled as a great legend. But in Italy something had survived more typical of the finer spirit of antiquity; the republic, Italy, was dotted with little states, largely democratic in their ideals, and often filled with real citizens. But the city no longer lay open as under the Roman peace, but was pent in high walls for defence against feudal war and all the citizens had to be soldiers.

In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light. In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

The same mode of symbolising the justification by works had evidently been in use in Babylon itself; and, therefore, there was great force in the Divine handwriting on the wall, when the doom of Belshazzar went forth: "Tekel," "Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting." In the Parsee system, which has largely borrowed from Chaldea, the principle of weighing the good deeds over against the bad deeds is fully developed. "For three days after dissolution," says Vaux, in his Nineveh and Persepolis, giving an account of Parsee doctrines in regard to the dead, "the soul is supposed to flit round its tenement of clay, in hopes of reunion; on the fourth, the Angel Seroch appears, and conducts it to the bridge of Chinevad. On this structure, which they assert connects heaven and earth, sits the Angel of Justice, to weigh the actions of mortals; when the good deeds prevail, the soul is met on the bridge by a dazzling figure, which says, "I am thy good angel; I was pure originally, but thy good deeds have rendered me purer;' and passing his hand over the neck of the blessed soul, leads it to Paradise. If iniquities preponderate, the soul is met by a hideous spectre, which howls out, 'I am thy evil genius; I was impure from the first, but thy misdeeds have made me fouler; through the we shall remain miserable until the resurrection;' the sinning soul is then dragged away to hell, where Ahriman sits to taunt it with its crimes." Such is the doctrine of Parseeism.

Obviously, the violence suppression of social movements is hardly new. One need only think of the Red Scare, the reaction to radical labor movements like the IWW, let alone the campaigns of outright assassination directed against the American Indian Movement or black radicals in the 1960s and early 1970s. But in almost every case, the victims were either working-class or nonwhite. On the few occasions where even much milder systematic repression is directed at any significant number of middle-class white people--as during the McCarthy era, or against student protesters during the Vietnam War--it quickly becomes a national scandal. And, while it would be wrong to call Occupy Wall Street a middle-class white people’s movement--it was much more divers than that--there is no doubt that very large numbers of middle-class white people were involved in it. Yet the government did not hesitate to attack it, often using highly militarized tactics, often deploying what can only be called terroristic violence--that is, if "terrorism" is defined as attacks on civilians consciously calculated to create terror for political ends. (I know this statement might seem controversial. But when Los Angeles police, for example, open fire with rubber bullets on a group of chalk-wielding protesters engaged in a perfectly legal, permitted "art walk," in an obvious attempt to teach citizens that participating in any Occupy-related activity could lead to physical injury, it’s hard to see how that word should not apply.) (p. 141-142)

But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the few years I had been coming and going from this town, there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things to coveted by all the people who did not have them. It was difficult to say why. It might have been only a private blindness, a private indifference which prevented me from seeing how gratifying the possession of power or the possession of fame could be. Whatever money did, it didn't do the things it was popularly supposed to do, and I thought I could speak with a certain minor authority on the matter because [...] I no longer spoke with the suspect voice of poverty. My hostility, if there was still hostility in me toward the rich, now seemed to flow from another source: a feeling, not quite identifiable, that there was something sinister about the way these people lived. But then, how could this life possibly be sinister? What harm could there be in the Braque bought in an art shop in Paris and now featured over the low couch against the pale wall? What danger could accrue from the immense albums of records stored in the living room or the den with the brick fireplace and the spotless desk? Why should it strike me darkly that a huge refrigerator, with Coca-Cola perpetually on ice, and the grapes kept perfectly cold by a servant, stood on the patio beside the thirty-foot pool? Why did I persist in reacting so oddly to all their comforts, their acquisitions, their rarities, their cool, large and enviable homes? The fault, most likely, was in myself; they weren't, perhaps, sinister at all. It was only a kind of voracity which struck me so, an insatiety that gave off, perhaps, a slight aura of the sinister.

In America a child can no longer visit the place where she was born a shopping mall stands there instead. In America a grownup can no longer see the school where she learned the art of growing sad a freeway goes through there now an overpass her memories of brick turn to glass the suburb goes from white to black and time speeds up so much she has to stay young forever and reset the clock every five minutes just to know where is there and there is everywhere because she lives in time and not in any space! In our country here the future is in ruins before it is built a fact recognized by postmodern architecture that grins at us shyly or demonically as it quoted ruins from other times and places! There are no buildings in America only passageways that connect migratory floods the most permanent architecture being precisely that which moves these floods from one future ruin to another that is to say freeways and skyways and the car is our only shelter the architecture of desire reduced to the womb a womb in transit from one nowhere to another!” Saddened by his own vision and sensing smugness in the audience, Wakefield is revolted by his desire to please the foreigners. He coughs. He is portraying his own country now for the sake of… what? Applause? There isn't any. He veers down another path. “The miracle of America is of motion not regret in New Mexico the has face of Jesus jumped on a tortilla in Plaquermine a Virgin appeared in a tree In Santuari de Chimayo the dirt turned healer a guy in Texas crasahed into a wall when God said Let me take the wheel! And others hear voice all the time telling them to sit under a tree or jump from a cliff or take large baskets of eggs into Blockbuster to throw at the videos the voices of God are everywhere heard loud and clear under the hum of the tickertape and all these miracle and speaking gods are the mysteries left homeless by the Architecture of speed and moving forward onward and ahead!” Wakefield throws his hands into the air as if to sprinkle fairy dust on the room; he is evoking the richness of a place always ready for miracles.

In 1853, Haussmann began the incredible transformation of Paris, reconfiguring the city into 20 manageable arrondissements, all linked with grand, gas-lit boulevards and new arteries of running water to feed large public parks and beautiful gardens influenced greatly by London’s Kew Gardens. In every quarter, the indefatigable prefect, in concert with engineer Jean-Charles Alphand, refurbished neglected estates such as Parc Monceau and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and transformed royal hunting enclaves into new parks such as enormous Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes. They added romantic Parc des Buttes Chaumont and Parc Montsouris in areas that were formerly inhospitable quarries, as well as dozens of smaller neighborhood gardens that Alphand described as "green and flowering salons." Thanks to hothouses that sprang up in Paris, inspired by England’s prefabricated cast iron and glass factory buildings and huge exhibition halls such as the Crystal Palace, exotic blooms became readily available for small Parisian gardens. For example, nineteenth-century metal and glass conservatories added by Charles Rohault de Fleury to the Jardin des Plantes, Louis XIII’s 1626 royal botanical garden for medicinal plants, provided ideal conditions for orchids, tulips, and other plant species from around the globe. Other steel structures, such as Victor Baltard’s 12 metal and glass market stalls at Les Halles in the 1850s, also heralded the coming of Paris’s most enduring symbol, Gustave Eiffel’s 1889 Universal Exposition tower, and the installation of steel viaducts for trains to all parts of France. Word of this new Paris brought about emulative City Beautiful movements in most European capitals, and in the United States, Bois de Boulogne and Parc des Buttes Chaumont became models for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York. Meanwhile, for Parisians fascinated by the lakes, cascades, grottoes, lawns, flowerbeds, and trees that transformed their city from just another ancient capital into a lyrical, magical garden city, the new Paris became a textbook for cross-pollinating garden ideas at any scale. Royal gardens and exotic public pleasure grounds of the Second Empire became springboards for gardens such as Bernard Tschumi’s vast, conceptual Parc de La Villette, with its modern follies, and “wild” jardins en mouvement at the Fondation Cartier and the Musée du Quai Branly. In turn, allées of trees in some classic formal gardens were allowed to grow freely or were interleaved with wildflower meadows and wild grasses for their unsung beauty. Private gardens hidden behind hôtel particulier walls, gardens in spacious suburbs, city courtyards, and minuscule rooftop terraces, became expressions of old and very new gardens that synthesized nature, art, and outdoors living.

The hope is that, by a circuitous route, these values will become – even if only a little – more powerful in reality. In the ideal scenario, they will radiate out from the gallery and shape the way we lead our lives. Yet the money that paid for them may have been accumulated under a very different vision of life: workers were paid the least possible amounts; only the responsibilities enforced by law were embraced; governments were lobbied to reduce consumer and environmental protection; quality was reduced as low as the market would allow; debts were paid slowly but creditors were hounded. Oddly, in their business, the artistic philanthropist had the opportunity to make real – on a large scale – the qualities they subsequently sought to honour in their gifts. Yet very often they did not. It would be better to repatriate the ambition and for the capitalists to be themselves the agents of the virtues they admire in the arts. The cost (in terms of cash) might be approximately the same. Their businesses might be a little less profitable year by year and they might not feel they had enough left over to lavish on the arts. But it would be no loss, for instead of hanging reticently on a wall, those values so ably captured in art – of friendship, love, wisdom and beauty – would be enacted day to day in the boardroom and the canteen, the distribution centre and the factory – in other words, in the vastly more consequential realm of commerce itself.

Finally, every society develops a system of aesthetic standards that get manifested in everything from decorative art, music, and dance to the architecture and planning of buildings and communities. There are many different ways we could examine artistic systems. One way of thinking about it is to observe the degree to which a society's aesthetics reflect clear lines and solid boundaries versus fluid ones. Many Western cultures favor clean, tight boundaries whereas many Eastern cultures prefer more fluid, indiscriminate lines. In most Western homes, kitchen drawers are organized so that forks are with forks and knives are with knives. The walls of a room are usually uniform in color, and when a creative shift in color does occur, it usually happens at a corner or along a straight line midway down the wall. Pictures are framed with straight edges, molding covers up seams in the wall, and lawns are edged to form a clear line between the sidewalk and the lawn. Why? Because we view life in terms of classifications, categories, and taxonomies. And cleanliness itself is largely defined by the degree of order that exists. It has little to do with sanitation and far more to do with whether things appear to be in their proper place. Maintaining boundaries is essential in the Western world; otherwise categories begin to disintegrate and chaos sets in.13 Most Americans want dandelion-free lawns and roads with clear lanes prescribing where to drive and where not to drive. Men wear ties to cover the adjoining fabric on the shirts that they put on before going to the symphony, where they listen to classical music based on a scale with seven notes and five half steps. Each note has a fixed pitch, defined in terms of the lengths of the sound waves it produces.14 A good performance occurs when the musicians hit the notes precisely. In contrast, many Eastern cultures have little concern in everyday life for sharp boundaries and uniform categories. Different colors of paint may be used at various places on the same wall. And the paint may well “spill” over onto the window glass and ceiling. Meals are a fascinating array of ingredients where food is best enjoyed when mixed together on your plate. Roads and driving patterns are flexible. The lanes ebb and flow as needed depending on the volume of traffic. In a place like Cambodia or Nigeria, the road space is available for whichever direction a vehicle needs it most, whatever the time of day. And people often meander along the road in their vehicles the same way they walk along a path. There are many other ways aesthetics between one place and another could be contrasted. But the important point is some basic understanding of how cultures differ within the realm of aesthetics. Soak in the local art of a place and chalk it up to informing your strategy for international business.

The large bedroom was crammed to overflowing with family relics, and examples of the various arts in which Lady Emily had brilliantly dabbled at one time or another. Part of one wall was decorated with a romantic landscape painted on the plaster, the fourpost bed was hung with her own skilful embroidery, watercolour drawings in which a touch of genius fought and worsted an entire want of technique hung on the walls. Pottery, woodcarving, enamels, all bore witness to their owner’s insatiable desire to create. From their earliest days the Leslie children had thought of their mother as doing or making something, handling brush, pencil, needle with equal enthusiasm, coming in late to lunch with clay in her hair, devastating the drawing-room with her far-flung painting materials, taking cumbersome pieces of embroidery on picnics, disgracing everyone by a determination to paint the village cricket pavilion with scenes from the life of St Francis for which she made the gardeners pose. What Mr Leslie thought no one actually knew, for Mr Leslie had his own ways of life and rarely interfered. Once only had he been known to make a protest. In the fever of an enamelling craze, Lady Emily had a furnace put up in the service-room, thus making it extremely difficult for Gudgeon and the footman to get past, and moreover pressing the footman as her assistant when he should have been laying lunch.

A Chinese Zen master[FN#230] tells us that the method of instruction adopted by Zen may aptly be compared with that of an old burglar who taught his son the art of burglary. The burglar one evening said to his little son, whom he desired to instruct in the secret of his trade: "Would you not, my dear boy, be a great burglar like myself?" "Yes, father," replied the promising young man." "Come with me, then. I will teach you the art." So saying, the man went out, followed by his son. Finding a rich mansion in a certain village, the veteran burglar made a hole in the wall that surrounded it. Through that hole they crept into the yard, and opening a window with complete ease broke into the house, where they found a huge box firmly locked up as if its contents were very valuable articles. The old man clapped his hands at the lock, which, strange to tell, unfastened itself. Then he removed the cover and told his son to get into it and pick up treasures as fast as he could. No sooner had the boy entered the box than the father replaced the cover and locked it up. He then exclaimed at the top of his voice: "Thief! thief! thief! thief!" Thus, having aroused the inmates, he went out without taking anything. All the house was in utter confusion for a while; but finding nothing stolen, they went to bed again. The boy sat holding his breath a short while; but making up his mind to get out of his narrow prison, began to scratch the bottom of the box with his finger-nails. The servant of the house, listening to the noise, supposed it to be a mouse gnawing at the inside of the box; so she came out, lamp in hand, and unlocked it. On removing the cover, she was greatly surprised to find the boy instead of a little mouse, and gave alarm. In the meantime the boy got out of the box and went down into the yard, hotly pursued by the people. He ran as fast as possible toward the well, picked up a large stone, threw it down into it, and hid himself among the bushes. The pursuers, thinking the thief fell into the well, assembled around it, and were looking into it, while the boy crept out unnoticed through the hole and went home in safety. Thus the burglar taught his son how to rid himself of overwhelming difficulties by his own efforts; so also Zen teachers teach their pupils how to overcome difficulties that beset them on all sides and work out salvation by themselves. [FN#230]

To believe in ultimate right answers is to build a wall around one small corner of a large apartment, live there, and then complain that there’s not enough space.

The theme of this exhibition is folk art, and the building, which is usually a typical white-cube space, has been dressed up to look like a circus. The walls are covered in strange murals; level with my head are alligators eating trapeze artists who are, in turn, eating small alligators. In large display cases are arrangements by the famous Victorian taxidermist and artist, Walter Potter. There's a feast being had by little ginger kittens that look like they were once---before dying and being stuffed with hay and then seated on miniature dining chairs and put in front of tiny cakes, pots of tea, and samovars---from the same litter. Their eyes are beautiful, black, glistening marbles. Next to the cat feast is another Walter Potter---rabbits diligently working at desks in a miniature classroom. It's thrilling seeing these works. I've known them for years; I studied them for my A-levels. In photographs, they seem clean and unreal. Up close, I can see the little dimples in the animals' skin where their muscles used to attach; I can smell the tiny, microscopic traces of hundred-year-old-blood inside them.

The conclusion I draw from the writings in this anthology, then, is finally this. That the overwhelming majority of attempts to supplant the postmodern consist in large measure of attaching a new prefix to the word 'modern' strikes me as a clear indication that we are not yet done with our modernity; and that such a number of new prefixes are being mooted (such as 're-' and 'dis-'; 'alter-' and 'auto-'; 'hyper-' and "meta-'; 'ana-' and 'digi-'; you might also have come across 'geo-' and 'neo-', too? suggests to me that there is a broadening variety of ways in which we experience or negotiate our modernity - or, alternatively, a broadening awareness that there is, and probably always has been, a variety of modernities. It was always simplistic to assume that for some reason they all came to an end suddenly, whether that was in May 1968, or when the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was dynamited, or at any other time. By the same token, it is no more sensible to assume that some new modernity was born when the Berlin Wall fell, or when American Airlines flight 1 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, or at some other arbitrarily selected moment of historical significance. Instead, ti might be worth suggesting that - with a nod to Bruno Latour - we have never been postmodern. Hence, I predict that debating the end of postmodernity will ultimately prove futile, but no more and no less futile than debating its origins and its birth. What the newly prefixed modernisms to be found in this anthology suggest to my mind is that what supplants postmodernity is a realization that we never left modernity behind in the first place, and that the discourses seeking to formulate or describe the late twentieth century as an era that was somehow (though there was never much clarity as to h o w 'post-'modernity amount to little more than half a century of groping down a blind alley.

belonging is our goal. It is that nine-letter word that you should write out in large letters and stick on your office wall. It is that word that should be at the forefront of your inspiration

GROUP FIFTEEN had its own private medical facilities attached to a well-known London teaching hospital. State-of-the-art facilities, the best doctors in the country, absolute discretion. Control watched through the window as the surgeon bent low to examine the damage that had been done to Twelve’s knee. The man—and his three colleagues—were wearing green smocks, their faces covered by surgical masks and latex gloves over their hands. Twelve had been anaesthetised and was laid out on the operating table, covered by a sheet with a long vertical slit that allowed easy access to his right leg. The surgeon had already sliced open his knee, a neat incision that began just below the quadriceps and curved around the line of his leg. The opening was held open by medical clips, and a miniature camera on an articulated arm had been positioned overhead, its feed visible on the large screen that was fixed to the wall in the observation suite.

The cop checked one more time that he was carrying his police ID, even though he sincerely doubted it would be of much use here, and plunged into the lion’s den. He was immediately assailed by a heady odor of hashish, mixed with the smells of mint and mu‘assel from the hookahs. The light was muted; the powerful air conditioner rumbled. The thick wooden tables, old Vienna-style lamps, bronze art objects hanging on the wall, and large steins of beer made the place look like an English pub. A waitress, Caucasian and scantily clad, threaded between the shapes, her tray loaded with glasses brimful of alcohol. Sharko had expected to find faces eaten away by syphilis, drugs, or drink. Instead, he was amazed at how attractive the clientele looked, mostly young and flamboyantly dressed.

The pastry kitchen is colder than I had imagined but smells delicious, as sweet and crisp as the bite of an apple. The walls are covered in white tiles, and almost everything is made of stainless steel. There are quite a few Chinese chefs in the kitchen, busy at work. They don't look rushed at all, carefully executing their tasks. One chef is releasing praline balls from their molds and then dipping them in a bowl of melted chocolate. It looks like a silken soup, and my mouth waters. He drops each ball in with a large fork and slowly stirs it around. When it comes up again, it has the satin sheen of the warm chocolate. He rolls it, the fork providing a cradle against a marble bench top until it is cool. The fork leaves no crease or mark on the finished product, a perfect sphere. There is such slow art to it; I feel hypnotized.

now the time to reckon with that question? We may begin to feel tendrils of doubt, the upwelling of inconvenient longings and needs, an uneasy sense that suppression or chronic discord will not be sustainable. We may encounter dread, fear, and a desire to escape through work, or screens, or drink. We’re dimly aware we may have to lose in order to gain, that painful upheavals may be the cost of emotional growth or inner peace. Oscillating between what is and what could be, between reality and possibility, between embracing and relinquishing, we feel disoriented and confused. When things feel bad, two options may loom up in our minds: endure (for the children, the shared history, the finances, the stability, the vow) or strive (for something more, another chance, a better relationship). Surrender or escape. Give in or start over. Depressive resignation or manic flight. These occur to us largely because it’s not at all clear where else to go. But the thought that soon follows is that we want to be honest, and we ask ourselves, what is the line between seizing vitality and manically defending against decline? What’s the difference between “settling” and acceptance? How might the effort to have more in our lives unwittingly result in less? When does accepting limits help us to make the most of what we have, and when does it signal premature resignation? Our dawning awareness of life’s limits means we know that we’ve reached the point where dismantling what we have and starting something new does not come cheaply. We know there’s really no such thing as “starting over,” only starting something different and trailing the inevitable complications in our wake. The acting out we see around us, which till now we’ve casually dismissed, begins to looks like one way that people try to combat the stasis of depression with the action of escape, attempting to transcend (at least temporarily) the “hitting a wall” feeling that this life stage can induce.

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Never limit your ambitions.” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.” “Raising your voice is not an argument.” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!” “Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Never limit your ambitions.” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.” “Raising your voice is not an argument.” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!” “Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!

That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory—all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private, for everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots—all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial. And to these natural modifiers of consciousness modern science has added its quota of synthetics—chloral, for example, and benzedrine, the bromides and the barbiturates.

Dozens of shiny brass wall sconces created the sort of dim and atmospheric lighting I'd only ever seen in old movies and haunted houses. And the room wasn't just darkly lit. It was also just... dark. The walls were painted a dark chocolate brown that I vaguely remembered from art history classes had been fashionable in the Victorian era. A pair of tall, dark wooden bookshelves that must have weighed a thousand pounds each stood like silent sentinels on either end of the room. Atop each of them sat an ornate brass, malachite candelabra that would have seemed right at home in a sixteenth-century European cathedral. They clashed in style and in every other imaginable way with the two very modern-looking black leather sofas facing each other in the center of the room and the austere, glass-topped coffee table in the living room's center. The latter had a stack of what looked like Regency romance novels piled high at one end, further adding to the incongruity of the scene. Besides the pale green of the candelabras, the only other color to be found in the living room was in the large, garish, floral Oriental rug covering most of the floor; the bright red, glowing eyes of a deeply creepy stuffed wolf's head hanging over the mantel; and the deep-red velvet drapes hanging on either side of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

On the wall is a large blow up photo of Humphrey Bogart.” I only picked Bogart because there was a popular poster of him selling around at that time. It was logical then, having the movie fantasies, that Bogart would be in one, and I conveniently used him over and over as I wrote and he became a major character in the story. I wrote and rewrote in that Chicago hotel room. I ate ribs with my friends John and Jean Doumanian. In those days, Chicago had a joint called the Black Angus that had ribs the taste of which gave life meaning you couldn’t get from religion, psychoanalysis, or great art. At that age I ate ribs,

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions. In childhood we ask, ‘Why is there good and evil?’ ‘How does nature work?’ ‘Why am I me?’ If circumstances and temperament allow, we then build on these questions during adulthood, our curiosity encompassing more and more of the world until at some point we may reach that elusive stage where we are bored by nothing. The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones. We end up wondering about flies on the sides of mountains or about a particular fresco on the wall of a sixteenth-century palace. We start to care about the foreign policy of a long-dead Iberian monarch or about the role of peat in the Thirty Years’ War.

My favorite idea to come out of the world of cultured meat is the 'pig in the backyard.' I say 'favorite' not because this scenario seems likely to materialize but because it speaks most directly to my own imagination. In a city, a neighborhood contains a yard, and in that yard there is a pig, and that pig is relatively happy. It receives visitors every day, including local children who bring it odds and ends to eat from their family kitchens. These children may have played with the pig when it was small. Each week a small and harmless biopsy of cells is taken from the pig and turned into cultured pork, perhaps hundreds of pounds of it. This becomes the community's meat. The pig lives out a natural porcine span, and I assume it enjoys the company of other pigs from time to time. This fantasy comes to us from Dutch bioethicists, and it is based on a very real project in which Dutch neighbourhoods raised pigs and then debated the question of their eventual slaughter. The fact that the pig lives in a city is important, for the city is the ancient topos of utopian thought. The 'pig in the backyard' might also be described as the recurrence of an image from late medieval Europe that has been recorded in literature and art history. This is the pig in the land of Cockaigne, the 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' of its time, was a fantasy for starving peasants across Europe. It was filled with foods of a magnificence that only the starving can imagine. In some depictions, you reached this land by eating through a wall of porridge, on the other side of which all manner of things to eat and drink came up from the ground and flowed in streams. Pigs walked around with forks sticking out of backs that were already roasted and sliced. Cockaigne is an image of appetites fullfilled, and cultured meat is Cockaigne's cornucopian echo. The great difference is that Cockaigne was an inversion of the experience of the peasants who imagined it: a land where sloth became a virtue rather than a vice, food and sex were easily had, and no one ever had to work. In Cockaigne, delicious birds would fly into our mouths, already cooked. Animals would want to be eaten. By gratifying the body's appetites rather than rewarding the performance of moral virtue, Cockaigne inverted heaven. The 'pig in the backyard' does not fully eliminate pigs, with their cleverness and their shit, from the getting of pork. It combines intimacy, community, and an encounter with two kinds of difference: the familiar but largely forgotten difference carried by the gaze between human animal and nonhuman animal, and the weirder difference of an animal's body extended by tissue culture techniques. Because that is literally what culturing animal cells does, extending the body both in time and space, creating a novel form of relation between an original, still living animal and its flesh that becomes meat. The 'pig in the backyard' tries to please both hippies and techno-utopians at once, and this is part of this vision of rus in urbe. But this doubled encounter with difference also promises (that word again!) to work on the moral imagination. The materials for this work are, first, the intact living body of another being, which appears to have something like a telos of its own beyond providing for our sustenance; and second, a new set of possibilities for what meat can become in the twenty-first century. The 'pig in the backyard' is only a scenario. Its outcomes are uncertain. It is not obvious that the neighbourhood will want to eat flesh, even the extended and 'harmless' flesh, of a being they know well, but the history of slaughter and carnivory on farms suggests that they very well might. The 'pig in the backyard' is an experiment in ethical futures. The pig points her snout at us and asks what kind of persons we might become.

[re: the "green martyrs"] But the saintly recluse does not intend to wall himself off from holy intercourse with his fellow humans. A little out of the way, he will still be available to those who walk the extra mile to find insight, instruction, and baptism. ... So the wished-for extremes of the Green martyrdom were largely - and quickly -abandoned in favor of monasticism, a movement, which though it could support and even nurture oddity and eccentricity subjected such tendencies to a social contract. Since Ireland had no cities, these monastic establishments grew rapidly into the first population centers, hubs of unprecedented prosperity, art, and learning.

It’s not like I’m famous or anything. Literally no one knows who I am. They just can’t see me making the art, because then they will know.” “And what’s so wrong with people knowing who you are?” Mom asks. I think of how to phrase it. That if people know who I am, they’ll put the pieces together that I’m Wren Gao’s daughter. The infamous baby who was born in a museum. It was such a sensation that it had become my entire identity until enough time had passed and I was no longer a child. I also don’t need the literal beginning of my life on display for everyone to see. It’s why I want to buy Baby Being Born back so no one can own something that is private and personal to me. So that a museum can’t play the moment I entered the world on repeat for days on end against a large white wall for strangers to watch and comment on. Is that so much to ask? I don’t know how to explain it to her. Instead, I just ask one question. “Do you regret it? Filming my birth?” Mom shakes her head firmly. “I don’t believe in looking backwards. It gave us financial security, that video. It gave me the career of my wildest dreams. Long-lasting art imitates life.