Punctuation Sometimes Your Better Off Without It

See para 3 particularly thats a magnolia above.

So boring tedious that i had to register with IMDb to warn others against wasting 3 hours and 8mins of theirs lives the film is about a bunch of spoilt Americans with shitty lives moaning about their lot. a very shallow attempt to make a clever film tears moaning and foolish behaviour. all of their problems are self inflicted and the film would have been good if they all died but that would have been a good ending so it didn't happen it rains frogs instead. (IMDB review of Magnolia)

This is clearly a film in which the viewer sees what he wants to see and it has been compared to a wide spectrum of earlier literature not least the Illiad so I'm probably not the first to suggest similarities with Conrad's Heart Of Darkness with John Wayne's Ethan Edwards being a variant of Kurtz. (imdb on The Searchers)

Hope's Stultitude a Cheerful Lay At Least I Like it Anyway
Gellett Burgess

The dismal day with dreary pace hath dragged its tortuous length along the gravestones black and funeral vase cast horrid shadows long.

Oh let me die and never mourn upon the joys of long ago with cankering thoughts the world's forlorn - a wilderness of woe!

For in the grave's dark bed to be though grim and dismal it appears is sadder not it seems to me than harrowing nights of tears.

Eric de Mare at RIBA, London

The works of this Swedish/British photographer of architecture were on recently at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

If you like Bernd and Hilla Becher you'll like his work - De Mare snapped follies, iron bridges, Swedish wooden warehouses, weird pyramidal tombstones, rare smock mills, flights of steps, shadows, fog, water, industrial architecture of all kinds. All recorded in abstract compositions of deep black, pale grey and every grade in between. Poetic, romantic and sublime - in the Burkean sense.

His work can be seen in several books, including my favourite, The Functional Tradition in Architecture, with text by J.M. Richards. Not available at amazon, but I found a copy at abebooks.com. All his books seem to be out of print - somebody do something!

Here's a preview of the show at dexigner.com.