Yesterday, I went up the roof of the Milano’s Duomo for the third time in my life, and this time, I did it by the elevator. The first time, I was travelling alone, so I took the stair’s option. The second time, it was myself, my wife, and our five-year-old daughter. They are both seasoned travellers, so again, we took the stairs. This time, we went together with my parents, and although I think that they are still young, we decided to take the elevator (or the lift, as we say in Europe).
First of all, the visit to the Duomo’s terraces is the most spectacular part of the cathedral tour in my opinion. Going up there three times is certainly not too many. The atmosphere at the top, the city views are just magical, especially if you catch a sunset on a warm Spring evening.
Another note is that ascending by lift is a very nice option, even if you are reasonably fit and do not mind climbing some stairs. The lift option offer some unique views from the top, in addition to the ones you would see if you climb on foot. The reason is that the lift is located at the back of the cathedral, and after you take it to the lowest terrace level, you walk along the roof to the place where you climb to the very top together with those people, who climbed the stairs. You get more views of the Corso Vittorio Emmanuelle II and Eastward city views (which are in good light during evening hours).
My wife and I are getting exposed to some 
. I should mention that my wife is not a fan of Warhol, to put in gently, and at some point we used to have heated discussions about whether the world had collectively gone mad in regarding him as a great artist (of course, recent developments in American politics have re-defined the notion of collective delusion and put arguments about art into perspective). Then, our daughter had another series of lessons based on the art of 
and 
. To be fair, the curriculum at 4Cats was balanced in that it also had a session on 
, 
and 
.
. In her school back in Canada, they used to paint ‘Kandinsky’s circles’ in the art class, so she was delighted to see a reproduction of the ‘Squares with Concentric Circles’ on the wall in our rental apartment here in Milan. When we saw an advertisement that a Kandinsky’s exhibit was coming up at Museo delle Culture, she was really looking forward to it.
”, where Tommy Lee Jone’s character, Travis Lehman, asks, pointing at a Kandinsky’s painting: “Those are nice pictures there. Did your kids do them?” When I look at my daughter’s drawings inspired by it, I can see why this is a cliche. The apparent similarity is a perfect illustration of the process of deliberate simplification that great artists like Kandinsky or Picasso go through. They converged on “child-like’ expressions not because they lack technical prowess, but because they eliminated all unnecessary elements in their art. In the case of a child, the process is very different, even if the results appears similar. She lacks the ability to include everything that she would like in her drawings and therefore settles only on the essentials. In other words, a five-year-old is limited by her technique, while the masters have come full circle to transcend the technique.
We thought that 
The MUBA concept itself reminded me of Montessori system of education – the kids get to touch, scratch, push, kick everything, and through all this get some sort of educational input. The show, if it is the right term, that we went to was called “Forbidden not to touch”. It was design to showcase the ideas of tactile and kinesthetic learning developed by Bruno Minari, an artist and inventor, who was a native of Milan.
“
“, “
” and “
“. As the titles imply, the underlying idea in all of them is to maximize the outcome of minimal efforts. I am a fan of Tim’s approach partly because I like the ideas of innovation and optimization that are inherent in hacking, but also because his view of hacking is deeper than simple cutting of corners on the way to a goal.
The concept of 10,000 hours that are needed to master a craft, which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in “
But this very feature of taking the conversation off-line, the ability to make it less spontaneous, also tremendously detracts from the depth of the communication. I recently listened to an interview with Prof. Sherry Turkle, who wrote a book about this called “
Painting can be a very effective excersize for facilitating creative decision-making. Robert Rodriguez, a movie director and an accomplished artist, mentioned in a recent interview that he used to make actors paint on the movie set between their filming sessions. The idea is that making creative decisions related to colour choice, composition, etc. are fundamentally more challenging than trivial details that people are often obsessed about in their everyday situations (e.g. props or makeup/wardrobe/lighting issues on a movie set, for which there are often very efficient workarounds that are not even worth fussing about.)
Of course, asking a stranger to take a photo has disadvantages. For one, there is a psychological barrier of striking a conversation. Perhaps, more importantly, there is no control of how the person would compose a shot. In my experience, the chance of getting a reasonably good photo by asking a random tourist to take it is less than 50%. More often than not, my face would end up dead centre in the frame and/or out-of-focus.
