Culture Making items tagged copying

A xerox on the face of eternity

2009-01-07T10:50:34Z

Nate: “Interestingly, its that once the Taj was completed, Shah Jahan had its designer blinded so he could never again produce something so beautiful. They tell the exact same story about the designer of St. Basil's cathedral in Moscow. That makes it doubly likely to be true, right?”

from "Cloning the Taj Mahal," NYTimes.com Ideas blog, 12 December, 2008

Architecture | Can you copyright an iconic building? That’s the issue raised by an expensively marbled clone of India’s Taj Majal built in Bangladesh by a wealthy filmmaker, who says he built it for Bangladeshis too poor to travel to see the real thing. Indian official: “You can’t just go out and copy historical monuments.” Bangladeshi: “Show me where it says that emulating a building like this can be illegal.” [Times of London]

Filmmakers on filmmakers on filmmaking: La Nuit Américaine Express

2009-01-07T10:50:34Z

Nate: “One of my favorite movies of the past year is François Truffaut's Day for Night (La Nuit Américaine), which manages to be both an engaging light comedy and a wonderfully thrilling meta-meditation on the art (and inevitable compromises) of filmmaking. Truffaut plays a director, essentially himself, trying to keep a not-that-great movie production on the rails. All this reminded (pre-minded) me of some of the better moments of Wes Anderson movies—so I was thrilled to see Anderson himself offering homage (the nicest form of cultural copying) in, of all things, an American Express ad.”

Day for Night (La Nuit américaine) trailer," directed by François Truffaut, 1973, and My Life, My Card ad, directed by Wes Anderson, 2006

Easy

2009-01-07T10:50:34Z

Andy: “When I speak on the posture of "copying culture" I usually show a "Christian" T-shirt (scare quotes are definitely required here)—lately it's been a ring-collar shirt with appliqué letters that say "JESUS DIED FOR PEDRO." But I think this one may replace it. There is so much wrong with this I honestly don't know where to begin. Very impressive.”

from Kerusso.com :: via Collide Magazine

Chain mosques

2009-01-07T10:50:34Z

Nate: “Apart from size (and, I guess, the Central Florida location), the parallel really is more McDonald's than Megachurch -- which makes sense when religious devotion has more in common with regular meals (i.e. several times a day) than a once-a-week banquet. One could argue that this is just a form of cultural copying, though I suspect that it's more akin to using the language of fast-food marketing to reclaim a function that mosques have had, in other contexts, for centuries.”

an Utne Reader post by Bennett Gordon, 24 July 2008 :: via Culture Log

Taking a page from the evangelical mega-churches that have popped up around the country, Muslims have begun setting up multi-site “mosque chains” to accommodate increasingly large religious services, Mallika Rao reports for the Religion News Service. Often branded as more progressive than other mosques, some of the organizations have begun offering gymnasiums, adult education classes, and even mixed-gender prayer areas. The strategy seems to be paying off, both financially and organizationally. Abeer Abdulla, a media specialist for the Islamic Society of Central Florida in Orlando, told Rao, “because of how streamlined we are, you can get off the highway from anywhere and find a mosque that is well-maintained, well-structured and that will always be open."

(Thanks, Pew Forum.)

Oops

2009-01-07T10:50:34Z

Andy: “There is a real danger that Christians' enthusiasm for God's work in human cultures will lead to simply baptizing whatever the culture is doing. Rarely has this been seen so clearly as in this communiqué from the Lutheran World Federation in 1975. As Sanneh describes it, "The communiqué insisted that the time had passed when Christianity could raise questions for China, pointing out that these questions were already settled for Chinese Christians who had long ago reached the conclusion that Christianity was, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, inimical to China's interests." Thirty years later, of course, we would never be so uncritical about culture. Of course not.”

“Love your neighbour to the point of denying yourself” is the ethical core of the Gospel. “Fight selfishness; serve the people” is the ethical core of Mao Tse-Tung Thought. “By their fruits you shall know them” is the decisive criterion of the Gospel. Marxism has sworn by the same test of “fruits” or “practice,” and in the case of China at least has both preached and practiced “continuing revolution” in its name. . . .

The social and political transformations brought about in China through the application of the Thought of Mao Tse-Tung have unified and consolidated a quarter of the world population into a form of society and life-style at once pointing to some of the basic characteristics of the kingdom of God. . . .

Christians . . . have to free themselves from the parochial Western context in which many of their Churches have developed and realize that the Gospel might be more powerfully expressed and fulfilled in the new type of society which is promoted in China.

from "The Louvain Consultation on China," Pro Mundi Vita 54 (1975) : : via Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations, p. 253–254