Vasco Câmara, a Portuguese film critic noticed that for three years in a row the opening films in Venice festival won the best picture Oscar award: Gravity, Birdman and Spotlight. Again La La Land opened the festival and shamelessly runs in 14 (!) categories for the “Academy Awards". Vasco notes that the “hype” for Hollywood lies not anymore in Toronto but in the Lido (the fashionable beach that closes Serenissima's Laguna). Like many other much more pressing matters, Hollywood awards, humbly, are symptoms of our Age (of Contempt).
Next week I’ll be in Naples and definitely try to go to Capri for a glimpse of a wonderful age of Design (Contempt).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wjDWnKTROI
This means a comeback of colonialism?
I’ve been looking at the origin of this Idea of America, an European pro-jection into a symmetrical land on the other side of the ocean.
By 1502, the date of the publication of Americo Vespucci’s letters (first widespread recount of the New World), Cantino draw a map of the western european discoveries on the other side of the Atlantic. Like in Americo’s letters, the USA of today are absent from those maps. Only a tip of Florida is present. The exotic lands described by Americo correspond to what is Brazil in our days, promising diferences, South from the equinocial line (the equator). What is now the USA, for some, was still hopefully an open sea to India.
Thomas More’s Utopia is clearly a response to Americo’s Letters since his character Hythloday, narrator was a traveler that went along in Vespucci’s travels. Hythloday travelled even far South to find Utopia.
From every possible names “Utopia”, “Moriana” “Campanellia” “Cabotia” or even “Corterealia”, “America" persisted as the noun designating a whole continent and a country. This is a first symptom of our state of affairs. For several years, Americo’s letters were considered as fictional as Utopia and other “descriptions” of the new world. But America, the name found a space needing for a new name, (discarding every other possibilities) as shinny as Europe, Asia or Africa, the three continents of the Ancient World. (quite puzzling why the Asians accept being designated as Asians and the Africans accept being designated as Africans and the A...)
So, before I engulf on further digressions, I must ask our colleagues in other parts of the world outside Europe to suggest a name for their continent. A name based in totally Euro-free designation.
Warm regards
Eduardo Corte-Real
PhD Arch.
Associate Professor
Professor Associado com Agregação
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Av. Dom Carlos I, nº4, 1200-649 Lisboa, Portugal
T: +351 213 939 600
No dia 25/01/2017, às 09:51, Eduardo A. Corte-Real <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> escreveu:
In the meanwhile, Lala Land won a record of Oscar nominations…
Eduardo Corte-Real
PhD Arch.
Associate Professor
Professor Associado com Agregação
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]>
[cid:257465FA-B422-4A4C-80BD-9AC56C0B3857]
Av. Dom Carlos I, nº4, 1200-649 Lisboa, Portugal
T: +351 213 939 600
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