an archaeology of the contemporary past

Today I’m in the Clark Center at Stanford, hub of the Bio-X Program – bioengineering and more. Steve Quake (Stanford Bioengineering and Applied Physics) is hosting a meeting of The Human Document Project – [Link] With us are Laura Welcher (Long Now Foundation), Tim D. White (Palaeoanthropology, Berkeley), Michael Fischer (Anthropological Sciences, Canterbury, UK), Andreas…

Gary Devore on Fellini Satyricon

Gary (Devore) is currently presenting a superb commentary on Fellini Satyricon – that sumptuous marvel of a movie – [Link] In a daring and masterful tour de force, the director has violated every cinematographic rule by producing a film with no pace, no psychology, no stars, and no story. Gary has opened my eyes to…

Paul Ingrassia – 15 cars for America

Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Ingrassia was with our Revs Program yesterday at the VAIL Facility of CARS (the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford). He was sharing with us his superb new book: Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in 15 Cars.   Written in his crisp and elegant prose, the book…

Olivier – Le sombre abîme du temps

Laurent Olivier’s wonderful book Le sombre abîme du temps has just appeared in translation (as The dark abyss of time: memory and archaeology) – [Link] Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces, that presence is filled with the past, that the future…