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Ricardo Bofill Leví (5 December 1939 – 14 January 2022)

Ricardo Bofill founded studio RBTA in 1963. Its best-known projects include Walden 7 and the brightly coloured La muralla Roja housing estate in Manzanera.

Other key projects from Bofill’s six-decade-long career include the Les Espaces d'Abraxas housing complex near Paris and, in Spain, the Castell de Kafka and La Fábrica – a repurposed cement factory containing the RBTA headquarters and Bofill’s family home.

More recently, his studio completed the sail-shaped W Barcelona Hotel in Spain and Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco.

Bofill received a number of awards for his work, including the Ciudad de Barcelona Prize of Architecture for La Fábrica and The Israelí Building Center’s Life Time Achievement Award.

He was also an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects and the Association of German Architects.

In tribute to his immense body of work, we revisit La Fábrica, an abandoned cement factory outside Barcelona. 

The colossal (and ever ongoing) project saw the architect transform the existing property into a pioneering studio, with his family’s living space nestled inside.

Photo Salva López / Kristina Avdeeva / Courtesy Of Ricardo Bofill Taller De Arquitectura, Ricardo Bofill, Gestalten 2019

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Jane Austen really said ‘I respect the “I can fix him” movement but that’s just not me. He’ll fix himself if knows what’s good for him’ and that’s why her works are still calling the shots today.

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Today is the birthday of the great David Bowie, Born January 8, 1947

#david bowie #god i miss him so much 😢

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Describing Terry Pratchett’s books is difficult. Someone asked me what the book I was reading was about, and I had to tell them it was about banking and the gold standard, but like in a cool way with golems and action. 

 I don’t think they believed me.

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Text: Sometimes in the dead of night on the way to the kitchen for a glass of water, I see an extra door in the hallway, black and imposing. 

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“You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become” - Hogfather, Terry Pratchett

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is it about capitalism? Is it about mental health? Its both, its definitely both 😅 by etrius42

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Where is everybody? José Manuel Ballester

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REALLY BLOODY EXCELLENT OMENS...

Many, many years ago (it was Hallowe'en 1989, for the curious, the year before Good Omens was published) Terry Pratchett and I were sharing a room at the World Fantasy Convention in Seattle, to keep the costs down, because we were both young authors, and taking ourselves to America and conventions were expensive. It was a wonderful convention. I remember a huge Seattle second-hand bookstore in which I found a dozen or so green-bound Storisende Edition James Branch Cabell books, each signed so neatly by the author that the bookshop people assured me that the signatures were printed, and really ten dollars a book was the correct price.

I could afford books. Good Omens had just been sold to UK publishers and then to US publishers for more money than Terry or I had ever received for anything. (Terry had been incredibly worried about this, certain that receiving a healthy advance would mean the end of his career. When his career didn't end, Terry suggested to his agent that perhaps he ought to be getting that kind of advance for every book from now on, and his life changed, and he stopped having to share a hotel room to save money. But I digress.) Advance reading copies of Good Omens had not yet gone out, but a few editors had read it (ones who had bid for it but failed to buy it) and they all seemed very excited about it, and thrilled for us.

On the Saturday evening Terry left the bar quite early and headed off to bed. I stayed up talking to people and having a marvelous time, hung in there until the small hours of the morning when they closed the hotel bar and all the people went away, and then headed up to the hotel room room.

I opened the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed in the dark across the room to where my bed was located.

I'd just reached the bed when, from the far side of the room, a voice said, “What time of the night do you call this then? Your mother and I have been worried sick about you.”

Terry was wide awake. Jet lag had taken its toll.

And I was wide awake too. So we lay in our respective beds and having nothing else to do, we plotted the sequel to Good Omens. It was a good one, too. We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD™ and there wasn't ever a good time.

But we never forgot it.

It's been thirty-one years since Good Omens was published, which means it's thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel. (I got to use bits of the sequel in the TV series version of Good Omens -- that's where our angels came from.)

Terry and I, in Cardiff in 2010, on the night we decided that Good Omens should become a television series.

Terry was clear on what he wanted from Good Omens on the telly. He wanted the story told, and if that worked, he wanted the rest of the story told.

So in September 2017 I sat down in St James' Park, beside the director, Douglas Mackinnon, on a chair with my name on it, as Showrunner of Good Omens. The chair slowly and elegantly lowered itself to the ground underneath me and fell apart, and I thought, that's not really a good omen. Fortunately, under Douglas's leadership, that chair was the only thing that collapsed.

The crumbled chair.

So, once Good Omens the TV series had been released by Amazon and the BBC, to global acclaim, many awards and joy, Rob Wilkins (Terry's representative on Earth) and I had the conversation with the BBC and Amazon about doing some more. And they got very excited. We talked to Michael Sheen and David Tennant about doing some more. They also got very excited. We told them a little about the plot. They got even more excited.

Rob Wilkins and David Tennant on the second day of shooting.

Me and Michael and Ash aged nearly 2.

What it was mostly like shooting Good Omens: peering into screens while something happened round the corner.

I'd been a fan of John Finnemore's for years, and had had the joy of working with him on a radio show called With Great Pleasure, where I picked passages I loved, had amazing readers read them aloud and talked about them.

(Here's a clip from that show of me talking about working with Terry Pratchett, and reading a poem by Terry: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06x3syv. Here's the whole show from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OsS_JWbzQ with John Finnemore's bits too.)

L to R: With Great Pleasure. John Finnemore, me all beardy, Nina Sosanya (Sister Mary in Good Omens) Peter Capaldi (he played Islington in the original BBC series of Neverwhere).

I asked John if he'd be willing to work with me on writing the next round of Good Omens, and was overjoyed when he said yes. We have some surprise guest collaborators too. And Douglas Mackinnon is returning to oversee the whole thing with me.

So that's the plan. We've been keeping it secret for a long time (mostly because otherwise my mail and Twitter feeds would have turned into gushing torrents of What Can You Tell Us About It? long ago) but we are now at the point where sets are being built in Scotland (which is where we're shooting, and more about filming things in Scotland soon), and we can't really keep it secret any longer.

There are so many questions people have asked about what happened next (and also, what happened before) to our favourite Angel and Demon. Here are, perhaps, some of the answers you've been hoping for.

As Good Omens continues, we will be back in Soho, and all through time and space, solving a mystery which starts with one of the angels wandering through a Soho street market with no memory of who they might be, on their way to Aziraphale's bookshop.

(Although our story actually begins about five minutes before anyone had got around to saying “Let there be Light”.)

from https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2021/06/really-bloody-excellent-omens.html

#good omens #oh my gooood #it's happening #neil gaiman

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Who gone love me like this?

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“How can this be?” said Lord Downey. “Don’t we pay our taxes?”

“Ah, I thought we might come to that,” said Lord Vetinari. He raised his hand and, on cue again, his clerk placed a piece of paper in it.

“Let me see now…ah yes. Guild of Assassins…Gross earnings in the last year: AM $13,207,048. Taxes paid in the last year: forty-seven dollars, twenty-two pence and what on examination turned out to be a Hershebian half-dong, worth one-eighth of a penny.”

“That’s all perfectly legal! The Guild of Accountants–”

“Ah yes. Guild of Accountants: gross earnings AM $7,999,011. Taxes paid: nil. But, ah yes, I see they applied for a rebate of AM $200,000.”

“And what we received, I may say, included a Hershebian half-dong,” said Mr. Frostrip of the Guild of Accountants.

“What goes around comes around,” said Vetinari calmly.

He tossed the paper aside. “Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo.”

“Are you telling us that Ankh-Morpork is bankrupt?” said Downey.

“Of course. While, at the same time, full of rich people. I trust they have been spending their good fortune on swords.”

“And you have allowed this wholesale tax avoidance?” said Lord Selachii.

“Oh, the taxes haven’t been avoided,” said Lord Vetinari. “Or even evaded. They just haven’t been paid.”

“This is a disgusting state of affairs!”

The Patrician raised his eyebrows. “Commander Vimes?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Would you be so good as to assemble a squad of your most experienced men, liase with the tax gatherers and obtain the accumulated back taxes, please? My clerk here will give you a list of the prime defaulters.”

“Right, sir. And if they resist, sir?” said Vimes, smiling nastily.

“Oh, how can they resist, commander? This is the will of our civic leaders.” He took the paper his clerk prooffered. “Let me see, now. Top of the list–”

Lord Selachii coughed hurriedly. “Far too late for that sort of nonsense now,” he said.

“Water under the bridge,” said Lord Downey.

“Dead and buried,” said Mr. Slant.

“I paid mine,” said Vimes.

–Terry Pratchett, Jingo

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Great Halloween, everybody! THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993) dir. Henry Selick

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Shakespearean Halloween Party I-IV (Remastered)

As Halloween is fast approaching (when did the run-up to Halloween become as involved as the run-up to Christmas?) I thought it would be a good time to revisit some of my earlier Halloween comics and re-draw the earliest ones digitally. Enjoy!

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(November 29, 1976 – August 28, 2020)

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New Reichenfixit series by Calais_Reno: “Many Happy Returns”

app

Series: Many Happy Returns by Calais_Reno

Summary: Imagine how it might have gone when Sherlock came back: There’s no Mary. They’ve both realised their feelings and finally admit it. Their lives begin to fit together again. Angst? Maybe a bit.

Here’s a set of stories with a single theme: Sherlock comes home to John. I have calculated thirteen possibilities that might have happened instead of what we saw in The Empty Hearse, each with a happy ending.

Maybe not thirteen. We’ll see. I have four so far:

A mysterious package

A stormy night-shift in the A&E

A tale of the human heart

The cat who made himself at home

starting 15 August 2020 with “The Wedding Gift”

Please reblog: the author doesn’t do Tumblr and the post-er doesn’t do Tumblr well! And reply with a request to be tagged or un-tagged. Bless.

And a live link will be added when the first tale posts

Seguir leyendo

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Understanding Poetry (after Mark Strand)

This comic appears in my new book, I WILL JUDGE YOU BY YOUR BOOKSHELF. You can order it from your favorite local bookstore, or find it online wherever you get your books!