Blog

  • The Casual Vacancy: A tale of life, and tragedy

    This is not a review of J.K. Rowling’s new novel, The Casual Vacancy. There are plenty of professional, well-written analyses of this much anticipated book out there (look here and here).

    This is simply a post about my thoughts on the book upon completing it yesterday evening.

    It’s very difficult for a writer who has become synonymous with her work, to carve a new niche for herself. There’s, for one, a lot of expectation about what the new work will be about. It will undoubtedly be judged against her previous works. For Rowling, I felt that she handled this book with brilliant deft of hand, switching gracefully to the realm of adult fiction.

    The Casual Vacancy is a far cry from the Harry Potter series. Whilst Potter had its moments of seriousness and plenty brooding darkness, this latest novel ups the notch on the gritty factor.

    Vacancy is a book about death, life, tragedy and triumph. It’s about all that occurs in a small British town – gossip, revelations, feuds and friendships tested. The cover jacket captures the book’s essence quite aptly: “A big novel about a small town…”

    More than anything, it makes some stark statements about life. This was especially apparent in the final pages of the novel, at its climax and resulting dénouement. It makes one pause for a moment, and consider that life is happening around us, and we should take it in as much as possible.

    Interestingly, there is no main character in this book, as there was so clearly in Harry Potter. Sure, we can argue that Barry Fairbrother is a central character, yet we only glimpse him in the first few pages; thereafter, he prevails as an essence that binds the multitude of characters together.

    There’s a lot of characters in this book. I mean, a lot. It often gets difficult to keep track of relationships, but I found that as I got further into the book, and became once again ensnared by Rowling’s storytelling charm, everything just seemed to flow. Yes, it is difficult to begin this book, but trust me, about a third of the way in, it becomes very difficult to put it down.

    I think this book is important on a number of levels. It serves, as I’ve mentioned before, as a comment on today’s society. It comments about the suddenness of life, and of death. It comments on the fickleness of people. It comments on greed and power, on traditions and culture, and the clash of ideologies. It follows multiple characters, allowing us to get into their heads and try and grasp the contrasting views bottled-up in the picturesque town of Pagford, a world imagined a million times differently to the warmness of Hogwarts.

    I try to refrain from making this thought-piece out like a review, but it really is just my take on this book. The ending will stick with me for a long time; Rowling allows us to amble comfortably through the book, and incrementally increases the pace into a devastating climax.

    The mistake many readers might make is to expect this novel to be on the lines of the Harry Potter series. And it couldn’t be any more different. There’s strong (and I mean disgustingly strong) language. The book is edgy, gritty, and very brutal in portraying these diverse characters. Yet it still contains Rowling’s soul in its execution; it’s honest and captivating. If you’re a Potter fan, and don’t wish to have your view of Rowling tainted by this novel, perhaps, then I suggest you steer well-clear from it. But if you like to read with an open mind, and enjoy getting lost in a book, then this is certainly a novel for you.

    In short, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

  • Boesman & Lena at the Baxter, and thoughts on Architecture

    I just watched an incredible performance (and contemporary interpretation) of one of Athol Fugard’s standout plays, Boesman and Lena. An absurdist piece written during Apartheid, the original play was one of my favourites when I studied it in Dramatic Arts at school. What added to the excitement of the evening was getting to experience such a phenomenal play in a venue equally remarkable – the Baxter Theatre Complex (a building we studied in Drama as well).

    The addition of music augmented a theatrical performance by three very talented actors. The lighting cues were clever, and really accentuated depth to the entire feel of the play. Grasping the essence of the titular characters is indeed a challenge, and I truly think they handled it with aplomb.

    Both comedic, and incredibly thought-provoking, the play left me compelled to reconsider it with the new knowledge and understanding I’m encountering through my studies of architecture and the urban context. Fugard’s play deals with, amongst a plethora of other issues, that of forced removals. It was then a lucky co-incidence that I watched this play at the end of a week when we studied District Six in our History of Architecture class. District Six was itself a stage for forced relocation during the Apartheid era in South Africa, and I couldn’t help but draw parallels between what I was watching unfold on-stage, and the theory I’ve been reading during our coursework in architecture.

    Contemplating a piece of dramatic art with the mindset of someone empathetic to the built environment is a curious experience, but I find it adding enormous depth to an already powerful form of expression. I left the theatre tonight feeling strongly that as architects, urban designers, engineers – people who care deeply about the condition of humanity in the urban space – we need to constantly look beyond the journals and blogs that propagate our discourses; we need to begin to make connections, intertextually, between various arts and sciences. The solution to the challenges humanity faces in this age lie like fragmented pieces of a chessboard, and it’s up to us to find those pieces and link them together.

  • iPhone 5: My thoughts

    The Apple of 2012 is clearly a different Apple to that under the Jobs era. We felt it at the iPad 3 (or is it “The new iPad”?) announcement earlier this year. And it was evident at last week’s unveiling of the iPhone 5, the phone that quite literally sets the benchmark for all modern smartphones.

    There was a number of interesting things that came out of that power-packed keynote, and much of it has been blogged about already (John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has an excellent overview of his thoughts on the new device).

    There is one thing I need to clarify before I go further. Apple is a company built largely on the success of this very device – the iPhone. They place a large emphasis on industrial design, to the point that their Senior Vice President of Design, Jony Ive, was recently knighted for his efforts in innovating at 1 Infinite Loop. The form of the iPhone 4 was positively received, and was the centre of the courtroom drama that recently unfolded between Apple and arch-rival Samsung. So it makes sense, then, that they stick to the philosophy of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

    It must be noted that looks are always deceiving when it comes to the engineering and design marriage that converges upon a product. The iPhone 5 is no exception. Whilst it may look similar to its predecessors of two years, this beast takes Apple to a whole new territory. In some ways, we can consider this iteration of the iPhone as yet another “stepping-stone” to something much grander that’s yet to be unveiled. (Sidenote: it has been said that many of Apple’s future products yet to be released have been greatly influenced by Steve Jobs before his passing, so there is certainly the possibility that at least the next iPhone will still bear some of his influence).

    Case in point: the new Lightning connector. This new (controversial) connector shakes-up Apple’s mobile product lineup by swapping the old 30-pin dock connector with a new, reversible 9-pin, tiny connector that will allow for designs to go as thin as the iPhone 5. This will loosen-up Apple’s design endeavors, and allow the company to pursue their trajectory of making products as thin and light as possible.

    Quite simply, the device is beautiful. Yes, it looks similar to the old one. But it carries Apple’s trademark class and elegance. It packs power under the hood, and the camera is phenomenal for a smartphone. There will be the usual anti-Apple brigade that rains upon just about every release of an Apple product, but the fact remains: Apple still sells products – and they sell them exceptionally well.

    But there is still that unmistakable feeling that things are changing at the Cupertino behemoth. CEO Tim Cook’s leadership is clearly having an effect on the company. For one thing, despite his comment that Apple would be “doubling-down” on secrecy, we knew quite a lot about iPhone 5 before it was launched – in fact, the night before the launch, we even knew what the new dock connector would be called. This perplexes me, but I do understand that having to cater for the incredible demand means ramping-up production earlier, leading to easier opportunities for various part leaks.

    Then there is the actual format of the event. Gruber captured this quite well in his post, so I won’t go on about it too much, but Apple events are feeling a little different under Cook. And I don’t mean that in a bad way; it’s just very interesting to see how Cook leads this company, and in what direction he’ll take it. No doubt they will continue from strength to strength – Cook was, after all, the mastermind behind Apple’s initial success with the iPhone due to his strategist skills in controlling the manufacturing operations of the original Apple phone.

    I have no doubt that iPhone 5 will set the standard once again for the smartphone market. However, the race is heating up: Android smartphones are packing more features in less time, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 is looking promising (although the recent Nokia announcement was incredibly under-whelming). Let’s not forget BlackBerry: their take on the smartphone user interface is going to put pressure on Apple to innovate its iOS platform. The anachronistic touches to iOS (such as the graphics in Game Centre and the Address Book and Calendar) have been a topic of debate recently, reportedly splitting design teams at Apple into two opposing camps of opinion on the matter. So the competition will certainly be good for us consumers as these smartphone giants compete to deliver us the best products yet.

    I’m keen to hear your thoughts on the new iPhone; leave them in the comments below.

  • Apotheosis

    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. –Arthur C. Clarke

    Have we, as a civilisation, become gods?

    This is a notion that has compelled me for some time now. Have we advanced ourselves significantly, to the point where our technologies are indistinguishable from magic?

    Consider this: 109 years ago, man made the first heavier-than-air flight. Less than a month ago, a vehicle the size of a car was sent over a billion miles away, to a neighbouring planet, controlled of its own volition, essentially an artificial intelligence, probing the surface of an alien terrain, looking for answers to life in the depths of our solar system.

    To someone living just 110 years ago, this concept would be absurd. It would be considered whimsical, something relegated to science fiction – or even still, to the realm of magic.

    So, have we become gods? Have we undergone apotheosis? Our engineering speaks for itself. Despite the gloom that has descended upon our collective psyche in the aftermath of a decade wrought by terrorism, political strife and climate crises, we have made significant progress. Mankind has bolted forward in an exponentially quickening pace, advancing his technologies to the point where they are becoming indistinguishable from the arcane realm of magic. The boundaries between magic and science are fast drawing toward a singularity.

    To better understand this, we need to adopt a mindset based upon perspective: understanding things based on the context surrounding them. I’ve laid out an example above (the progress of flight), but this stands for any other technological achievement – from something we take for granted today, such as the household refrigerator – to the advanced science powering nuclear power stations, hydroelectric stations, and even our floating laboratory – the International Space Station, a lab that’s advancing our understanding of life-threatening diseases like cancer. The idea of communicating across continents at the swipe of a touchscreen is indeed a “magical” thing, something that would be alien to humans living under Imperial Roman rule. A thousand years ago, these thoughts didn’t even cross the great minds of the time. Yet today, they are given components of the technological world we live in.

    To the ancients, our civilisation has become the Vulcans, Mars’, Jupiters and Zeus’s that they revered. The question remains, though: with this increasingly powerful knowledge, how far will we go to protect the collective wisdom of the ages?

  • What is Design?

    There are many objects in our world. From the moment you wake up, you have encountered the Designed World – the world that was thought-out by engineers and designers to make your life better.

    But what exactly is design? What does it entail, and how do we know when we’ve encountered something designed?

    I’ve been fencing with this question for some time now. And whilst I haven’t come to a conclusion, my best thought is that design entails that which has been thought about, thoroughly, before its execution. Thus, any object that has been considered from a host of perspectives, where the person behind it has truly considered what they are unleashing upon the world.

    There’s much talk these days about sustainability and “going green” – thus the argument arises: should we continue to create objects at the rate we are doing so? Or should we take a step back, and consider what is already there, and then think about the long-term goals of implementing solutions to counteract the devastating environmental effects currently afflicting our planet?

    Thus, design has become an entity that has both changed the world, and is currently being changed by the world. It will be interesting to watch the drama that unfolds as long-term objective products fight against the more temporal objects currently thrown at us.