Great Regulars: But, as the comedian George Carlin said,

it's called the American Dream because you're asleep. At college, Rickard studied US history--slavery, civil rights--and lost his faith in this family vision.

His adult view of America was a land not just of great achievement but also of massive injustice.

"When I started this project, I really wanted to look at the state of the country in these areas where opportunity is non-existent and where everything is broken down. On the one hand, these Google street pictures accentuate those feelings because the cameras heighten that atmosphere of alienation, of invisible people, isolated, having no opportunity, everything decaying and broken. But on the other hand, that is the reality."

from Bryan Appleyard: from The Sunday Times: Google Street View as Art

~~~~~~~~~~~

In this cause, he [Clive James] tells the story of the New Zealander Sir Keith Park who, with rare brilliance and courage, administered Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. His statue was on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for a while, and some young columnist moaned that she had never heard of him, as if "she really thought ignorance was a more honest form of knowledge". James does not name her, and he controls his rage to end with the magnificently balanced clause--"the battlefield where he led his pilots to a victory that cost so much, and you could say cost too much, except that defeat would have cost everything".

"Everything", of course, includes the freedom of that columnist to be ignorant.

from Bryan Appleyard: from The Sunday Times: On the Great Clive James

~~~~~~~~~~~

But his [Thomas Heatherwick's] mechanical imagination was prodigious. At the age of seven, he stumbled on the idea of the hybrid car, a motor-dynamo combination that he thought at the time would be a perpetual motion machine.

"Nobody would explain to me why it wouldn't work, they didn't tell me about friction and heat. It's funny how some of the simplest things you imagine when you are young suddenly appear later, not that I invented the hybrid car. But I do remember thinking with that greed children have that ice creams should be bigger and then, years later, they invented the Magnum, enough ice cream on a stick to make you sick."

from Bryan Appleyard: from The Sunday Times: Thomas Heatherwick and the Big Red Bus

~~~~~~~~~~~