
This week the BBC website and the Shobus blog agreed on something: that candy-striped postmodern buildings from the 1980s were suddenly beautiful again. Buildings which look like Memphis furniture. Buildings like One Poultry and MI6 HQ in London, or Kisho Kurokawa's Softopia headquarters in Ogaki, Japan:
Here's Kisho Kurokawa discussed in O.lamm's entry on Shobus blog.
Here's Mullets. White jeans. Architecture?, an article on the BBC News site, which begins: "As with fashion, styles come and go in buildings. With the haircuts, clothes and music of the 1980s making a comeback, is its architecture due a revival?"
When I watch old buildings become newly beautiful, am I watching buildings change or watching my own eyes change? Or perhaps I'm watching change itself, and finding change itself beautiful.
Here are some people listening to their own ears change in an I Love Music thread called "Do you ever overload on a band or artist at a particular point in your life until one day you wake up and you just can't listen to them any more?"
Here's a list of records I'm finding beautiful at the moment:
Ariel Pink: "Worn Copy"
Fan Club Orchestra Japan: "20001: A Space Odyssey"
Various: "A Paen To Flexipop"
DJ Elephant Power: "No Si, No So"
Robert Ashley: "Perfect Lives"
Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto: "Vrioon"
Rusty Santos: "The Heavens"
Terrestrial Tones: "Oboroed / Circus Lives"
And some old kabuki record I bought last year in Omihachiman. Speaking of last year, here are some of my blog entries from one year ago, which contain a lot of beauty, I think:
Graphics: Generics or Chaotics?
A Postcard from Kyoto
Osaka, yukata, geta
Polyhedric
Very much my cup of tea
Here are two beautiful people:
May Kasahara
Eye Yamataka
Sixty years ago today one of the least beautiful things in human history happened. Nuclear weapons were used against civilians for the first time.