Tuesday, August 17, 2010
HOW IMPACT WOODLAND HOME
The house was built with maximum regard for the environment and by reciprocation gives us a unique opportunity to live close to nature. Being your own (have a go) architect is a lot of fun and allows you to create and enjoy something which is part of yourself and the land rather than, at worst, a mass produced box designed for maximum profit and convenience of the construction industry. Building from natural materials does away with producers profits and the cocktail of carcinogenic poisons that fill most modern buildings.
Some key points of the design and construction:
- Dug into hillside for low visual impact and shelter
- Stone and mud from diggings used for retaining walls, foundations etc.
- Frame of oak thinnings (spare wood) from surrounding woodland
- Reciprocal roof rafters are structurally and aesthaetically fantastic and very easy to do
- Straw bales in floor, walls and roof for super-insulation and easy building
- Plastic sheet and mud/turf roof for low impact and ease
- Lime plaster on walls is breathable and low energy to manufacture (compared to cement)
- Reclaimed (scrap) wood for floors and fittings
- Anything you could possibly want is in a rubbish pile somewhere (windows, burner, plumbing, wiring...)
- Woodburner for heating - renewable and locally plentiful
- Flue goes through big stone/plaster lump to retain and slowly release heat
- Fridge is cooled by air coming underground through foundations
- Skylight in roof lets in natural feeling light
- Solar panels for lighting, music and computing
- Water by gravity from nearby spring
- Compost toilet
- Roof water collects in pond for garden etc.
This building is one part of a low-impact or permaculture approach to life. This sort of life is about living in harmony with both the natural world and ourselves, doing things simply and using appropriate levels of technology. These sort of low cost, natural buildings have a place not only in their own sustainability, but also in their potential to provide affordable housing which allows people access to land and the opportunity to lead more simple, sustainable lives. For example this house was made to house our family whilst we worked in the woodland surrounding the house doing ecological woodland management and setting up a forest garden, things that would have been impossible had we had to pay a regular rent or mortgage. To read more about why we did it and why this is an important option to meet the challenges of climate change and peak oil.
Would you like to learn more about this sort of building and gain practical experience? Why not join us on another exciting building project. There will be opportunities for everyone of all abilities and areas of interest. Click here for more details.
Want To See More?
Plans of the house
How we did it
Why we did it
The family's perspective
The NEW HOUSE we're working on now!
Source:
http://www.simondale.net/house/
THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR
A Movie a Day, Day 92: Eat Pray Love and Cairo Time
by Elise Nakhnikian on August 16th, 2010 at 7:08 pm in Film
This has been a good summer for something we haven’t seen much in the movies: the female midlife crisis. (Could this be the next wave of Baby Boomer self-analysis?) Here’s what I wrote today for TimeOFF about two of the latest, Eat Pray Love and Cairo Time.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Corrida: Michael Atkinson's Hemingway Cutthroat
by Richard McDonough on August 16th, 2010 at 6:10 pm in Books
Let me start with a caveat. (You were expecting caviar canapes? Not in this economy!) I thought the writer of the tattooed lady trilogy, that dead Scandinavian fellow, was wretched. He had a great character (she of the tattoo), and yet he left her out of the first book for far too long a time, a time that nearly made me lose patience with the whole. And then he wrote far too long for the message he was carrying in his damaged psyche. But that is another story for another time. Needless to say, he laughed all the way to the grave, though his putative widow was buggered by the state. Back to our boy.
This book is a mess. Hemingway, had he the energy, and I doubt he would, given his disgust for life, would roll over in his grave, or urn, or whatever. First is the prose. Perhaps for you it is the story, but for good or bad, for me it is the prose.
Tags: Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway Cutthroat, Michael Atkinson, Minotaur Books, The Sun Also Rises, Thomas Dunne
The Conversations: Todd Haynes
by Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard on August 16th, 2010 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]
Ed Howard: In all of his films, Todd Haynes takes elements of gaudy tabloid culture and warps them to his own purposes, because he sees—in the lurid stories about sexuality and decadence and violence that we like to tell ourselves, in the celebrity gossip rags and TV news and hyped-up movies—deeper truths about identity, gender, politics, entertainment and sexuality. Haynes finds, within the sensationalist and the melodramatic, a culture's vision of itself, distorted by a funhouse mirror but nevertheless evocative of the unvarnished truth. Or maybe the truth really is as strange as the mirror suggests: entertainers as plastic action figures, made to be manipulated and posed; sexuality as a plague, terrifying and mysterious; suburbia as a deadening cage for the emotions; the past as a manufactured façade, rendered superficially safe by the suppression (or ignorance) of all those impulses that go unchecked in the present; identity as malleable and fluid, the true self supplanted by endless masks and games. Haynes' appropriation of the language of media—the docudrama, the genre film, the educational documentary, all eras and styles collaged together in his cinematic blender—is an examination of the ways in which culture both disguises and probes the truths about individuals, their secret desires and fears and fantasies.
Tags: Dottie Gets Spanked, Far From Heaven, I'm Not There, Poison, Safe, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, The Conversations, Todd Haynes, Velvet Goldmine
A Movie a Day, Day 91: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
by Elise Nakhnikian on August 15th, 2010 at 5:43 pm in Film
If Inception is a video game that becomes interactive only after it’s over, when you compare notes with other fans, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a video game you watch someone else play. That might not sound like much fun, but this movie is an upper, thanks to its inventive video game/cartoon visuals, crisp editing and constant stream of wry observational barbs.
Director Edgar Wright found his own way to animate the black-and-white graphic novels his movie is based on, adding bright colors but keeping a comic-book look. Figures are frequently silhouetted or shot in very bright or dark lighting, and cartoonish graphics often pop up on the screen, like the “Yeah Yeah Yeahs” and lightning bolts that emanate from Scott’s band when they play; the pink hearts that float up from their lips as he kisses Ramona, the girl of his dreams; and the way the snow melts in Ramona’s wake as she rollerblades down Toronto sidewalks. The dreamlike editing helps too, as characters move from one setting to another without comment or cuts, the conversation or background music simply continuing as the background changes.
Tags: A Movie a Day, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Powers, Edgar Wright, Ellen Wong, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Cera, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
2010 Primetime Emmy Winner Predictions
by Ed Gonzalez on August 15th, 2010 at 1:59 pm in Television
On August 29, Betty White will win her seventh Emmy, Neil Patrick Harris will likely win his first, and I will suffer a stroke if 30 Rock wins its fourth Outstanding Comedy Series trophy. Of course, now that Barack Obama is president and Tina Fey is no longer required to stump for him on SNL as Sarah Palin, will Emmy finally and mercifully annul its relationship to 30 Rock, the most seizure-inducing show on television since Mary Hart? If so, which show among the six nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series is the Alice that stands to slay Fey's Jabberwocky—nominated for a measly 15 awards this year after setting the all-time record last year with 22? And what about Mad Men? The most dapper, zeitgeist-y, cinephile-pleasing program of our post-Sopranos generation, Mad Men has won the Outstanding Drama Series prize two years in a row, but is it time to finally give it to the other, superior AMC drama in this category for, not least of which, refusing to wear its themes so transparently on its manicured sleeves? Because it's impossible to tell just how much an Emmy voter takes into account a whole season's achievements (or lack thereof) when filling out their ballot, and how much they base their picks off of the individually submitted episodes, your guesses are as good as mine, which I offer below—not so humbly and with more than a dash of wish-fulfillment—two weeks before the big night.
Tags: 30 Rock, Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Moss, Emmy Awards, Glee, Jane Lynch, Jim Parsons, Mad Men, Modern Family, Neil Patrick Harris, Nurse Jackie, Tina Fey
Uma Jornada Maravilhosa: Carlos Roberto de Sousa and Silent Cinema in Brazil
by Aaron Cutler on August 15th, 2010 at 9:39 am in Interviews
The Jornada Brasileira de Cinema Silencioso, just completing its fourth year, is one of the world's most prominent silent film festivals. Running from August 6–15 at São Paulo's Cinemateca Brasileira, it included films from Brazil, America and Germany, with titles by Raoul Walsh, Victor Fleming and G.W. Pabst. In previous years the festival spotlighted German, French and Japanese archives; this year the focus shifted to Sweden, with a chance to see some Greta Garbo silents and a screening of the cult horror film Häxan on Friday the 13th. I spoke to Carlos Roberto de Sousa, the series curator, to learn more.
Tags: Carlos Roberto de Sousa, Cinemateca Brasileira, Humberto Mauro, Joris Ivens, Jornada Brasileira de Cinema Silencioso
Mad Men Spoilers: Season 5, Episode 2, "Little Feet"
by Matthew Phelan on August 15th, 2010 at 8:38 am in Comics
Matthew D. Phelan is a cartoonist and writer based in the United States. His work has appeared in Chemical Engineering, Anthem, and The Onion.
Tags: Christina Hendricks, Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men, Mark Moses
A Movie a Day, Day 90: I Vitelloni
by Elise Nakhnikian on August 14th, 2010 at 11:06 pm in Film
"Here's the question: Is 'I Vitelloni' the work of an artist whose vision is just flowering—or that of an artist whose vision has fully ripened and is about to decay? I can't decide," wrote Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle.
That's an interesting way to look at it, but I see Federico Fellini's career more as a sine wave than an arc or a slow and steady ripening. Whatever drew Fellini to Jungian psychology, séances, psychedelics, and circuses made some of his movies too stagily fantastic for my tastes (Satyricon), while others are bathetically sentimental (La Strada, Nights of Cabiria) or both (Juliet of the Spirits). But studded throughout his career are masterpieces like 1973's Amarcord, 1963's 8 1/2, and 1953's I Vitelloni, which use Fellini's trademark mix of realism and fantasy with restraint, evoking a time and place and state of mind with exquisite precision.
Tags: Federico Fellini, Franco Fabrizi, I Vitelloni, Nino Rota
A Movie a Day, Day 89: His Girl Friday
by Elise Nakhnikian on August 13th, 2010 at 5:26 pm in Film
I hate to be asked what my favorite movie is (how can you pick just one when there are so many great films, which you love for so many different reasons?), but I was asked in an interview a few years ago, so I had to come up with an answer. The one I eventually came up with—His Girl Friday—is still what I'd say if anyone asked. Other movies (not a lot, but some) may be as wonderful as Howard Hawks's brilliant adaptation of The Front Page, but I don't think any others mean quite as much to me personally. So I watched it again this morning, as I have every couple of years since I first saw it in a revival theater in Austin.
Tags: A Movie a Day, Ben Hecht, Billy Gilbert, Cary Grant, Charles Lederer, Charles MacArthur, His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks, Rosalind Russell
A Movie a Day, Day 88: Quest for Honor
by Elise Nakhnikian on August 12th, 2010 at 7:58 pm in Film
Yesterday's movie was Quest for Honor, a documentary about the practice of people killing their own wives, daughters, and sisters for bringing shame on their families. As a title card at the end reminds us, these "honor" killings happen around the world, but the focus of this scrappy documentary is Kurdistan.
At its core is a real-life murder mystery that's being investigated by the director of a women's center, a former teacher named Runak Faraj, and Kalthoum, the young woman who works with her. A vivid picture of the area and its deep-rooted tradition of honor killings emerges as Runak and Kalthoum talk to police and to relatives and in-laws of the murdered woman, Nesrin—about how and why she was killed. Most of the people interviewed are surprisingly candid, the husband's family as much as admitting their guilt even as they deny it. (Nesrin was shot point blank by some of her in-laws for the sin of seeing other men, even though her husband was deceased.)
Tags: A Movie a Day, Mary Ann Smothers Bruni, Quest for Honor
Abraham Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party at Theatre Row
by Jason Clark on August 11th, 2010 at 7:00 pm in Theater
The question you might find dancing in your head while watching Abraham Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party—a livelier title than show, to be sure—isn't why it landed a prime locale in the current off-Broadway season, but how it even got into last year's New York International Fringe Festival to begin with. This is not meant to be a patent insult (well, okay, maybe a little), but really a query as to how such a preachy tract with a gimmick wowed the nudity-starved, thrill-seeking Fringers. Judging by the production mounted right now, it's about as edgy as the Fred and Daphne segments of Scooby-Doo. And the clothes aren't even as cool.
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party, Rashomon, The Norman Conquests, Theatre Row, Vince Pesce
by Elise Nakhnikian on August 11th, 2010 at 6:46 pm in Film
"What does revenge mean when you've forgotten everything?" asks one of the triad hit men enlisted by Costello (Johnny Hallyday), a retired French gangster, to avenge the slaughter of his daughter's family in Macao. That question is never answered, making the subplot about Costello's failing memory feel more like a gimmick than a theme: This isn't a film that inspires deep thought. But the camerawork, the lighting, the colors, and especially the carefully choreographed dances of death are so good they make Vengeance worth watching.
Johnny To's trademark standoffs are the best thing about Vengeance, which came out last year after premiering at Cannes and has just been released in the U.S. (It's available only on IFC's Movies on Demand channel.) Often slowed down, underlit, and color-saturated to increase the drama, his gun battles generally start by dramatizing the conflict with a vivid scene or image and end with hard guys in close quarters, blasting the crap out of each other. The one that will probably stick with me longest from Vengeance starts at a picnic ground where Costello and his crew have tracked down the men they are hunting. Finding their targets with their wives and kids, our guys settle into a neighboring table and wait for the families to leave. The other men know why they're there, but their families have no idea. Then a colorful boomerang floats into view, travelling to Costello's table from the table they're watching and back again. It's a beautiful sight and a powerful symbol, making visible the link between the two tables while reminding us of the child who threw it, whose carefree world is about to explode.
Tags: A Movie a Day, Jean-Pierre Melville, Johnny Hallyday, Johnny To, Vengeance
Christopher Nolan: What Are We Watching, Exactly?
by Tom Elrod on August 11th, 2010 at 7:00 am in Film
"The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon's got plans. You know, they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds." —The Joker
Christopher Nolan is an artist. Just what kind of artist, and how much we should praise him for it, is another matter. No matter what anyone may say, he is no Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick's films, despite their objectivity and reputation for coldness, were studies of characters. Nolan's films, by contrast, are studies of plot. Indeed, you could say he's an artist of plot.
This is both his great strength and great weakness. There is much to be frustrated about with his oeuvre: his incoherent action sequences, the endless Hans Zimmer percussion compositions, and his apparent inability to not kill his female characters. But there is no denying the extreme popularity of his films, both in box office grosses and the passion of fans. Indeed, the intense love of Nolan on the Internet is something both frightening and fascinating. Jim Emerson gives the summary of the brouhaha over Nolan's latest film, Inception (see also Dennis Cozzalio and Roger Ebert). Essentially, a vocal group of fans believes it is wrong and ridiculous to suspect that Nolan is anything less than a genius.
Tags: Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan, Following, Hans Zimmer, Inception, Insomnia, Memento, The Dark Knight, The Prestige
A Movie a Day, Day 86: Airplane!
by Elise Nakhnikian on August 10th, 2010 at 8:05 pm in Film
There have been so many movie parodies by now that the genre is probably ripe for a parody of its own, yet nobody's done it better than the granddaddy of them all, Airplane!. A Marx Brothers farce wrapped around an Arthur Hailey melodrama and given a couple of whirls in the blender, Airplane! celebrated its 30th birthday last night with a showing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which was followed by a Q&A with the gracefully aging ZAZ boyz (Jerry and David Zucker and Jim Abrahams) who cooked it up.
The first hour or so of Airplane! is so crowded with laughs that it had me crying, though there may be a little too much dead air in the last third or so, when traumatized pilot Ted Striker and his sweet stewardess girlfriend Elaine are landing the plane. (The directors acknowledged as much when someone asked if they'd been approached to do the sequel. Yes, Abrahams said, but they'd run out of airplane jokes by then. "Ran out of them by the second half of the movie, actually," said David Zucker.)
Tags: A Movie a Day, Airplane!, David Zucker, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams
Mad Men, Season 4, Episode 3, “The Good News”
by Luke de Smet on August 10th, 2010 at 10:47 am in Television
The 1960s California of Mad Men is seemingly a vibrant and relaxing place where someone like Dick Whitman can go and take it easy, leaving his Don Draper (Jon Hamm) alter-ego behind in New York. The highways are open, the girls are liberated and endlessly precocious, and Dick looks just as good painting in his boxers as Don Draper ever has wearing his suits and sipping his Old Fashioneds.
This week's Mad Men episode, "The Good News" (written by Jonathan Abrahams and Matthew Weiner, and directed by Jennifer Getzinger), brings Don back to Anna Draper (Melinda Page Hamilton), the widow of the man whose identity Don stole, for the first time since season two. For half the episode Don is referred to solely by his real name, Dick Whitman, and we see him casually dressed and largely carefree, smoking pot and hitting on a teenager for seemingly no reason other than that he feels young. These trips to visit Anna are a strange sort of return home for Don, allowing him to lay down his guard and regenerate, and to reconnect with the man he once was. Anna provides Don with both a connection to his past and atonement for his present-day sins. Continue Reading
Tags: Christina Hendricks, Gerald Downey, January Jones, Jennifer Getzinger, Jon Hamm, Jonathan Abrahams, Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, Melinda Page Hamilton
Source:
http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/
Sangam house
…a bunch of open-minded people gathered to exchange thoughts and ideas on a high contemporary and international level.
Every winter the Sangam House invites approximately twenty writers to live and work at an arts institution in southern India. Each year, half the invited writers come from the South Asian subcontinent (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) and half from other countries around the world. Sangam House is open to writers in all languages and disciplines - we welcome fiction and non-fiction writers, poets, translators, playwrights and screen-writers.
The Sangam House season usually runs for about 10 weeks between November and February. Individual residence periods are determined by writers' needs and available resources (though we recommend a residency period of no less than 2 weeks). A Sangam House invitation means that board and lodge are covered for the duration of the writer's stay with us.
Source:
http://www.sangamhouse.org/
Monday, August 16, 2010
Image House
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| Energy Efficient House 699 × 737 - 143k - jpg | Gibson House 350 × 310 - 46k - jpg | Our House Plans 525 × 369 - 223k - jpg | House 400 × 327 - 24k - jpg |
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| Emily Murphy House 300 × 300 - 50k - jpg | HOUSE CARE 550 × 360 - 56k - jpg | of our new house. 1024 × 768 - 316k - jpg | house image 458 × 447 - 25k - gif |
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| cutaway house 480 × 356 - 37k - jpg | Schröder-Schräder House 521 × 373 - 71k - jpg | Towner House 640 × 426 - 69k - jpg | White House Picture 780 × 522 - 83k - jpg |
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| Frederick Douglass House. 640 × 514 - 74k - php | house 400 × 320 - 46k - jpg | House oracles here. 400 × 300 - 72k - jpg | Southdown Plantation House 400 × 314 - 26k - jpg |
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| House 3 description 640× 501 - 92k - jpg | Tales From Turnpike House 500 × 500 - 68k - jpg | The White House 800 × 450 - 121k - jpg | Schröder-Schräder House 513 × 395 - 56k - jpg |
Source: http://www.google.co.in/images?hl=en&q=house&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=4R5pTOKlJpLOuAPg0KH-Aw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQsAQwAA
