Scandal!

Shopgirlove loves a controversy.  Boston delivers pretty consistently: busing, corruption, disappearing gangsters, gigantic public works projects, the Catholic Church, and the always entertaining university presidents, not to mention the equally entertaining students.  But nothing is quite as much fun as local art and architecture! Brandeis announced it was going to sell off the remarkable collection of the Rose Art Museum and fired the Director. That didn't go over very well... MIT bought an international, edgy, landmark that promptly fell apart. Contemporary art got a new home that turned its back on the patrons. (Also falling apart. Check out the electrical tape on the back railings.) Ah, and then there's Renzo Piano.  Povero Piano! The FAA had a little  problem with his vision competing with the vision of those silly airplane pilots and the people of Cambridge had the gall to suggest that Harvard should maybe limit the grand  experimental gestures to non-residential sites.  The crimson tide rolled back and settled for a rehab, sorry "transformation," of its existing space. But the Piano plan that got even Shopgirlove deeply perturbed? Tear down the carriage house at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. STOP THE MADNESS!

However, there is a new jewel on the local scene: massport unveiled a memorial to the 9/11 victims on American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175. Thank you to Moskow Linn Architects for an example of modern design that honors purpose and beauty.

Transcendent

Shopgirlove was utterly undone by a strange little film called "The Story of the Weeping Camel." She has no way to express the impact of this cinematic journey--except to say that it managed to distill everything of any weight in the human experience to one universal tale that relied entirely on sight and sound. Watch it without the subtitles. This story rises above dialect. It rises above plot. And action. And big names. It is nothing more, nor less, than the most compelling argument for the role that art can play in our lives if we let it. And the role that we could play if we truly accepted our responsibility to the world we have shaped: for better or for worse. 

It is astonishing. 

Orwell

Shopgirlove could gush for days about him. His essay on the toad! But for most, he is always that Big Brother guy, or the other Big Brother guy, depending on how much tv you watch. (Season 8 was a doozy.) But the other Big Brother is getting even scarier. Or funnier, depending on the mood you're in. Shopgirlove was in a pretty good mood. She was gladdened by reports that Dextre's plugged in. That led her to wondering if robots "dream of electric sheep." This, in due course, led her to a disturbing story about just how scary Big Brother can get. Good-mood-be-gone! There's a movie--Tilda Swinton, you rock! And a donation box. At the end of the day, though, it's business as usual.