Menara Da Vinci (Da Vinci Tower), Jakarta

The angle is not perfect here, since neither the top nor the grand, classicist entrance is visible. But this is the most important postmodern building I have seen, for the simple reason that it seems to me it could be said to be no longer postmodern at all, but to transcend postmodernism’s mode of pastiche and not only converge towards but achieve a real creative historicist traditionalism – and thus, with it, seriousness.

Gore Vidal, 1925-2012

2009

Photo: David Shankbone

Bill Kauffman, ‘The Last Republican’ (2008 review of Selected Essays of Gore Vidal)

Brian Doherty, ‘Goodbye to Gore Vidal, America’s Biographer and Champion’

Edit, August 3:

Justin Raimondo, ‘Patriotic Gore’ (2004 review of Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson)

Bill Kauffman, ‘The Populist Patriotism of Gore Vidal’ (2006 review of Point to Point Navigation, the second volume of Vidal’s memoirs)

Michael Lind, ‘Gore Vidal: The Virgil of American Populism’

Cf. my post ‘Till frågan om populismen‘ (in Swedish)