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wwl the big 870
"between 3 and 7 in the afternoon (PST) and click on Listen Live. (They'll make you fill out a form, but it's nothing and worth it.) It's a call in-show hosted by a pair of chicory-steeped who-dats named Deke Bellavia and "Pal" Al Nassar. For four hours a day, they buck up a devastated city, giving practical advice -- "Sha, you best make sure all your circuit breakers is thrown when they come round to turn on your power" -- listen to people going bugshit about bureaucracy -- "I told that FEMA lady, 'Hon, I got a contractor fixin' to take OFF my new roof if you don't get the check over here soon'" -- and give the latest news about the city and state governments tripping all over each other."via v zars
They're passionate and local in a really fucked-up locale.
---for example: a call from a honeysuckle-toned woman the hosts called Miss Margaret. She'd obviously lost everything, but was full of sweet southern optimism. Seems her earlier calls to the show had caught the attention of Life (or, as she called it, Life's) Magazine and they've done a story on her that's coming out soon. She was thrilled and convinced that "help is on the way" for the people who live on her street. "I know it's true because you keep getting calls from people who say, 'I'm coming to New Orleans next month and I'm going to go to Constance Street to see Miss Margaret. And now it's going to get bigger." (I guess word's gotten out on the internet stream.)
Deke: Miss Margaret, I'm going to be in the city all day tomorrow and I want to find you and have a rich coffee with you.
Margaret: Love to, Brother Deke, but you know I don't have my kitchen
back. I'm going to have to make it for you instantly.
Deke: I'll take it however you got it, dawlin'.
CVI painting stretchers
Philip Johnson is gone, but not forgotten. A slick sales campaign by real estate marketing firm The Sunshine Group tells us that the Urban Glass House, a vestige of the final projects designed by the late, renowned architect, is rising as we speak in a fast-changing urban industrial outpost at the western edge of SoHo and just north of Tribeca.
The neat marketing package belies a convoluted backstory: First, this isn’t the building Johnson intended as his last legacy (in fact, it is more of a tribute design than one of his own.) Second, the man who dreamed up the project and hired Johnson’s firm-restaurateur-turned-developer Nino Vendome, who after 9/11 turned his nearby restaurant into a home-away-from-home for thousands of rescue and recovery workers at Ground Zero-has all but vanished from the project as well.
endless boogie
Get down and greeezy with NYC's kings of choogle, together since 1997 but just getting around to releasing studio stuff this year. Their live shows have been sporadic for the fact that they only play gigs when specifically asked to, though recently they've frequently whipped local audiences into a frenzy with their heavy jams supporting assorted Dungen shows. Live, the guitarists trade off invocations of Tony McPhee, Peter Green, Zoot Horn Rollo, Lobby Lloyd, and Ron Asheton, and if you don't know who some of those guys are, don't worry too much about it. Endless Boogie are here to deliver rock salvation. Lineup: Grease Control (Drums), Memories From Reno (Bass), Top Dollar (Vocal, Guitar), the Governor (Guitar). Upcoming live gigs: December 17th at Kyber Pass in Philly (with Boogie Witch), December 18th in Baltimore at Talking Head Club (with Mighty Flashlight and Arboretum). Current LPs Volume 1 and Volume 2 on the Mound Duel label, try www.fusetronsound.com. Today's live selections: Executive Focus/Aztec Boogie/Way Uptown/Boogie #23/Rattleshake/New Green Bo/Rollin' and Tumblin'. Thanks to the band and OCDJ, watch out for future stuff on No Quarter label. 1:03:14 - 2:45:28 (Real | MP3)described by brian as one part can and one part canned heat - thats a 1:42:14 long (rockin good) show!
warh-blog
eyebeam re-blog by emma
bottle-cap inn
via zoller
Building Category 5 protection, however, is proving to be an astronomically expensive and technically complex proposition. It would involve far more than just higher levees: there would have to be extensive changes to the city's system of drainage canals and pumps, environmental restoration on a vast scale to replenish buffering wetlands and barrier islands, and even sea gates far out of town near the Gulf of Mexico.
The cost estimates are still fuzzy, but the work would easily cost more than $32 billion, state officials say, and could take decades to complete.
waveland mississippi digital phgotographs from jim louis in new orleans
ahrem!
The Internet Archive has worked with tapers, tape traders, funders, admins, and over 1000 bands to build a great non-commercial music library that is freely accessible. Technically and policy-wise, it has been invigorating as you can probably appreciate. We have made changes in the past and we will make changes again.
Following the policies of the Grateful Dead and the Dead communities we have provided non-commercial access to thousands of great concerts. Based on discussions with many involved, the Internet Archive has been asked to change how the Grateful Dead concert recordings are being distributed on the Archive site for the time being. The full collection will remain safe in the Archive for preservation purposes.
Here is the plan:
Audience recordings are available in streaming format (m3u).
Soundboard recordings are not available.
Additionally, the Grateful Dead recordings will be separated from the Live Music Archive into its own collection. The metadata and reviews for all shows and recordings will remain available.
We appreciate that this change will be a surprise and upset many of you, but please channel reactions in ways that you genuinely think will be productive. If we keep the bigger picture in mind that there are many experiments going on right now, and experiments working well, we can build on the momentum that tape trading started decades ago.
Working together we can keep non-commercial sharing part of our world.
Thank you for helping find balances that work for all involved.
-brewster
Digital Librarian and Founder
-Matt Vernon
Volunteer GD Archivist
happy palace
Here's an MP3 of the sounds made by Iceberg B-09A in Antarctica. It was recorded by scientists from Germany's Alfred Wegener institute for polar and marine research, as they recorded seismic signals to measure earthquakes and tectonic movements on the Ekstroem ice shelf on Antarctica's South Atlantic coast.
From the Wegener Institute press release:
Tracking the signal, the scientists found a 50 by 20 kilometer iceberg that had collided with an underwater peninsula and was slowly scraping around it.
"Once the iceberg stuck fast on the seabed it was like a rock in a river," said scientist Vera Schlindwein. "The water pushes through its crevasses and tunnels at high pressure and the iceberg starts singing.
The iceberg sounds were originally recorded at 0.5 hertz, far below the range of human hearing. The MP3 here is speeded up many times to bring the sounds into the audible range.
bruce babbit "Cities in the Wilderness"
Restoring the Florida Everglades. Dismantling obsolete dams. Returning the wolf to Yellowstone and the condor to the wild. Creating the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Each was a landmark of environmental progress in the 1990s and each was realized under the guidance of then Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.
Now he draws on these experiences to develop a surprising message: such episodic conservation victories, however important, will not be sufficient either to protect our disappearing open spaces or to contain the blight of urban sprawl.
In his new book, CITIES IN THE WILDERNESS, Bruce Babbitt makes the case for a new national land use policy. Throughout our history, from George Washington’s day to the present, federal policies have encouraged and subsidized destructive resource exploitation and out-of-control development that threaten the American landscape. The time has come for an enlightened role that the federal government can play, to ensure that the places and creatures we care about will endure for generations to come.
Babbitt will discuss:
• What Las Vegas and New Jersey can teach the rest of America about conservation;
• How to consolidate Federal land to preserve ecosystems and wildlife;
• The tactics necessary to bring competing interests to the bargaining table;
• How we can fix the Missouri River;
• New roles and goals for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and
• How smart land use planning makes for better cities and more open space.
The message is clear: America can be a land of growth and opportunity, but not at the expense of the landscapes we cherish.
From Bruce Babbitt’s incisive analysis comes a vision and a program for how it should be done: a federal leadership role in land use planning, a new way of thinking about open space that retains local control while acknowledging national interests. Cities in the Wilderness celebrates key ac-complishments in the environmental field while planning for greater ones – and Bruce Babbitt is an inspirational guide along that path.
Since 2003, the board has been under fire from owners of rejected works and members of the artist’s circle who claim their knowledge of Warhol’s practice is ignored. The board has routinely denied the authenticity of silkscreens made without Warhol’s direct supervision, but his former associates argue that to reject such works contradicts Warhol’s practice of having works of art printed without his direct oversight. Scholars point out that it was precisely Warhol’s blurring of authorship and his adoption of modes of mass production that mark his significance in the history of art. There is growing consensus in the field that, rather than exclude such works from the catalogue raisonné being compiled by the foundation, they should be included, allowing the market to decide their value.
“It is just bad art history and folly not to draw on the contemporaries who actually knew the artist,” says art critic Richard Dorment of the Daily Telegraph in London, a commentator in a BBC documentary on the controversy, scheduled to air in late January. “They are saying he worked like an Old Master and that his touch was very important,” says Mr Dorment, “but he is a conceptual artist, the main descendant of Duchamp”.
Architects may see a dreamy parallel to Le Corbusier's concrete 1950's apartment-block housing in Marseille, raised up on rows of streamlined columns. Yet Ms. Hadid's design draws as much on the serpentine freeways of Los Angeles and postwar Europe's industrial landscape as it does on such High Modernist precedents. Its imposing, muscular forms celebrate the heroic large-scale urban infrastructure of an earlier era, allowing us to see it with fresh eyes.
while we are at it with the tubes. if you act fast you can still cherry pick Leland Stanford Junior Marching Band covering the tubes's White Punks On Dope off brian turner's playlist for a listen. what puts it over the top and a seriously good listen is the extended fans in the bleechers sing along chant at the end. go ahead and listen, i bet you cant do it just once. 1st times free, cummon just say yes. white punks on dope white punks on dope white punks on dope...
What do you want from life
To kidnap an heiress
or threaten her with a knife
What do you want from life
To get cable TV
and watch it every night
There you sit
a lump in your chair
Where do you sleep
and what do you wear
when you're sleeping
What do you want from life
An Indian guru
to show you the inner light
What do you want from life
a meaningless love affair
with a girl that you met tonight
How can you tell when you're doin' alright
Does your bank account swell
While you're dreaming at night
How do know when you're really in love
Do violins play when you're touching the one
That you're loving
What do you want from life
Someone to love
and somebody that you can trust
What do you want from life
To try and be happy
while you do the nasty things you must
Well, you can't have that, but if you're an American citizen you are entitled to:
a heated kidney shaped pool,
a microwave oven--don't watch the food cook,
a Dyna-Gym--I'll personally demonstrate it in the privacy of your own home,
a king-size Titanic unsinkable Molly Brown waterbed with polybendum,
a foolproof plan and an airtight alibi,
real simulated Indian jewelry,
a Gucci shoetree,
a year's supply of antibiotics,
a personally autographed picture of Randy Mantooth
and Bob Dylan's new unlisted phone number,
a beautifully restored 3rd Reich swizzle stick,
Rosemary's baby,
a dream date in kneepads with Paul Williams,
a new Matador, a new mastodon,
a Maverick, a Mustang, a Montego,
a Merc Montclair, a Mark IV, a meteor,
a Mercedes, an MG, or a Malibu,
a Mort Moriarty, a Maserati, a Mac truck,
a Mazda, a new Monza, or a moped,
a Winnebago--Hell, a herd of Winnebago's we're giving 'em away,
or how about a McCulloch chainsaw,
a Las Vegas wedding,
a Mexican divorce,
a solid gold Kama Sutra coffee pot,
or a baby's arm holding an apple?
thomas hine populuxe
The decade from 1954 to 1964 was one of history's great shopping sprees, as many Americans went on a baroque bender and adorned their mass-produced houses, furniture and machines with accouterments of the space ange and of the American frontier. "Live your dreams and meet your budget," one advertisement promised, and unprecedented numbers of Americans were able to do it. What they bought was rarely fine, but it was often fun. There were so many things to buy--a power lawnmower, a modern dinette set, a washer with a window through which you could see the wash water turn disgustingly gray, a family room, a charcoal grill. Products were available in a lurid rainbow of colors and a steadily changiung array of styles. Commonplace objects took extraordinary form, and the novel and exotic quickly turned commonplace.
It was, materially, a kind of gold age, but it was one that left few monuments because the pleasures of its newfound prosperity were, like Groucho Marx's secret word, "something you find around the house." There was so much wealth it did not need to be shared. Each householder was able to have his own little Versailles along a cul-de-sac. People were physically separated, out in their own in a muddy and unfinished landscape, but they were also linked as never before through advertising, television and magazines. Industry saw them as something new, "a mass market," an overwhelmingly powerful generator of profits and economic growth. There was ebullience in this grand display of appetite, a naivete that was winning, and today, touching...
The essence of Populuxe is not merely having things. It is having things in a way that they and never been had before, and it is an expression of outright, thoroughly vulgar joy in bing able to live so well. "You will have a greater chance to be yourself than any people in the history of civilization" House Beautiful told it readers in 1953. The greatness of America would be expresed by enrichment of the environment, bu the addition of new equipment to the household and by giving up European models and, instead, finding inspiration in the American past and, most of all, in its promising future.
paul sawyers on lulu
Intermodal Shipping Container Small Steel Buildings explains how to purchase steel cargo containers and modify them for use as buildings under 1000 sq ft in size. Learn how you can save up to 40% over tradition lumber and factory made steel structures with these unique building blocks. New and used steel shipping containers are available nationwide. It's easy to buy containers and modify them for use as workshops, garages, cabins, guest houses, super carports, RV - 5th wheel covers, and much more (the book shows how). Enjoy a building that's up to fifty times stronger than most structures, built quick and with amazingly little labor. Take part in the shipping container building revolution with the worlds first book on the subject...Intermodal Shipping Container Small Steel Buildings! Includes photos, diagrams, plans, and charts. 103 pages, soft cover.
shipping container housing q and a
1. How much of one side can be removed without weakening the structure? None, the moment you make an aperture in the sidewall regardless of location, the structure is weakened. Almost all apertures will require perimeter framing along with some rail to rail intermediate posts (an intermediate post is any reinforcement from bottom to toprail not located at a corner).
2. If you build one yourself, how cheaply can it be done? The lower cost the container will be inversely proportional to the labor you put back into it. Containers that are 20 years old and are still structurally suitable regrettably are usually so dinged up that when it comes to putting on its prom dress (exterior siding) that you end up adding back huge amounts of hat channel and labor to accomodate. Plan on this being dollar for dollar equivalent to DIY stick or Panel built. Consider your containers (ahem, ISBUs) to be your dried in Framing Package.
3. Are they harder or easier to insulate and how are they affected in the hot/cold months? Once insulated they perform the same. The difficulty to insulate is really no different than anything else.
4. What is it like to actually live in one? To live in one unit is OK, that really comes down to location. 40' units are 320 sq ft and I lived in an apartment smaller than that but it was at the beach so who cares. To live in a home, is no different than any other home. Ouyr system cuts open the entire sidewalls so you end up with huge areas.
5. How hard is it to cut out windows and doors? Sidewall corrugations range from 1.5mm to 2.0mm thickness. Plasma torch works well. I once cut an entire 40' unit in half with a Sawzall and a circular saw (took 20 sawzall blades and 4 circular saw blades) Would not recommend that to anyone.
6. What about the gap in between them? All dry containers whether they be STd or HiCubes have camberedd roofs just like the deck of a ship. so not only is there a gap but when two containers are side by side each half of each cvontainer is pitched down toward that gap. For a do it yourselfer, I have succesfully take a piece of 1" angle turned it so the flanges straddled each container then stitch welded it down the center line (when we were done it just looks like a little elongated pitched roof down the gap). then we caulked it liberally.
I would not want to discourage anyone from a DIY project. I would like to stress something Michael speaks of often which is predictability of outcome. The less units cost to start with would be an indicator (not a fact) just an indicator that the boxes are less fair and true for home building. Also when marring two boxes side by side some bottom rails finish above the plane of the wood floor, some even with it, some below it. This causes many problems in the field. Some containers are 9'5 1/2" while others are a true 9'6"
You will usually need to support the home at more locations other than the cornerposts. This will need to be accomplished through intermediate posts ( again just the framing package). Bear in mind you will need to extend that post through the rails and possibly hockeypuck shim to ensure it engages the can above or below it.
I do not want to make it sound daunting, rather eyes wide open. Maybe another thought is not how cheap can it be done, but instead, how much value can I create for the same effort.
I like the computer metaphors (similes?) I think of it that in the 60's computers components used to be housed in steel enclosures. Then at some point someone said lets package it up in some plastic enclosures. The components remained the same, the computing goal remained the same, just the way to enclose it was altered. All these houses of wood, now folks are considering containers as a new enclosure, but living, facades, appliances, function, that will still be the same. Anyway, theres a thought trying to get out somewhere.
My background is the Merchant Marine as a deck officer aboard container and with Steam ship companies as an intermodal equipment manager. Today we are actively engage in the modification and newbuilds of containers. WHile living in China I came across a locale that had 20 stand alone homes made form containers with Sod on the roof. Always thought that was clever but have no data to indicate what it does for R or K values.
You will find Paul Sawyers book very relevant to your project. Do not hesitate to let us all know what your progress is
"The travel industry is sitting on the last virgin territory in the entire world," says Kirby Jones, the president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association. "Americans want to go there for the same reason that dozens of companies around the world have. There's money to be made."
Ian Schrager, the New York entrepreneur who helped create the trend for stylish boutique hotels with the Royalton in Manhattan, the Delano in Miami Beach and the Mondrian in Los Angeles, went to Cuba in 1994-95. "I was completely enchanted with the country," he says. "I was completely taken with it. To me what was interesting was Old Havana, like Venice, a special place frozen in time."
The two weeks of Mardi Gras parades and parties have for decades been the city's binding cord, bringing together all segments of society and thousands of outsiders for a mix of the sacred and the profane. But with planning for the February Carnival season now under way, Mardi Gras has been plagued by harsh financial realities, indecision, lowered expectations and the possibility that this year's parade lineup could be absent some of its most popular krewes, or social clubs.
After the city announced plans for smaller and fewer Mardi Gras parades, dissatisfied krewes protested. Responding to the pressure, an advisory panel to Mayor C. Ray Nagin recommended Wednesday that an additional weekend be included in an abbreviated Mardi Gras parade season. The mayor is expected to agree to a pre-Lenten Carnival season of eight days, instead of the customary 12, culminating Feb. 28 on Mardi Gras Day (known in English as Fat Tuesday).
WFMU will be featured on New York Noise -- the NYC-area local access cable video show. In addition to an hour's worth of cool videos, there'll be footage shot at the Record Fair, and cameos by a number of WFMU DJs. The WFMU feature will air on NYC cable channel 25 on November 19th at 10 PM, December 2nd at 9 PM, and December 4th at 10 PM. More info on New York Noise can be found here.tape it tivo it watch it
TWOJ Baudrillard (Annotated Bibliography)
9-11 Probers Leave Questions Behind
The private watchdog group formed by the former members of the 9-11 Commission is closing up shop. The announcement of its last media event—a December 5 briefing where the 9-11 Discourse Project "will issue its final assessment of progress on all 9/11 Commission recommendations"—came today. This is no surprise: The project (funded by entities like the Carnegie Corporation, the Drexel Family Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) was intended to last for just a year after the commission expired in August 2004, its mission to "educate the public on the issue of terrorism and what can be done to make the country safer." But even if this end was long planned, it doesn't mean everyone thinks the job is finished.
"I think it's really ironic that they are closing up shop at a time when their credibility is being called into question because of Able Danger," says Debra Burlingame, whose brother was pilot of the plane that hijackers flew into the Pentagon.
Able Danger is the secret military intelligence unit featured in stories published this summer in which military officers claimed that they had information about lead hijacker Mohammed Atta a year before the 9-11 attack. What's more, the sources of the story claim they told the 9-11 commission about it, but that information was left out of the final report. The 9-11 commissioners have dismissed the story as overblown, claiming in an op-ed piece just this week that their staff checked out the story and found no evidence it was true.
Able Danger isn't the only question that people keep asking. People who lost firefighters sons, husbands, and brothers still want answers regarding the issues of command & control and radio communication. "The questions that remain unanswered are the whole stuff of chapter 9," says Sally Regenhard, founder of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, who lost her firefighter son in the towers. "What happened to New York?" Others feel the commission played politics with its finding that Iraq and al Qaeda had no meaningful connections. And Burlingame feels the commission was never disposed to really examine what damage was done by the legal "wall" separating intelligence and criminal investigations at the FBI, since one of the commissioners, Jamie Gorelick, played a role in interpreting that rule during her Justice Department stint under Bill Clinton. Other commission members had similar conflicts on other issues, leading to a lot of recusals.
"How did a group of 9/11 families go from being seen as the entirely sympathetic victims of perhaps America’s greatest tragedy to being viewed as a self-interested obstructionist force that could hold up ground zero’s progress for years, banishing any sign of cultural life downtown—except, perhaps, for the culture of mourning?"The Grief Police - No one says the 9/11 families aren’t entitled to their pain. But should a small handful of them have the power to reshape ground zero?
What Bernstein and his IFC colleagues hadn’t counted on was the families. Ielpi and other family activists had long ago come to believe that the memorial for the September 11 victims should be much larger and more prominent than ground-zero developers had envisioned. They saw the IFC as competition—not just for land but for the public’s attention and, not least, charitable donations. In private meetings, they argued that the IFC would take the emphasis away from what happened to their loved ones—and would even use some of the artifacts from the disaster, like Fritz Koenig’s Sphere sculpture from the Twin Towers’ plaza, that they wanted for their memorial. The IFC was meant to be aboveground, the memorial below; the families complained that visitors to ground zero would be distracted by the IFC and its street-level cultural center before they descended to the memorial.
When their lobbying didn’t succeed, they took the battle to another level. In June, a Wall Street Journal op-ed by a 9/11 family member named Debra Burlingame all but accused the IFC of being a left-wing Trojan horse, suggesting that intellectual elites were trying to sneak a blame-America museum onto sacred ground. Under the Take Back the Memorial banner, the family members made the rounds on cable talk shows, appeared before Congress, and were cheered on by right-wing blogs. The PR battle was fought until September, when Governor George Pataki, who had once called for an array of cultural institutions to rise from the ashes, yanked the IFC from the plan for downtown that he largely controls. Burlingame and Take Back the Memorial were victorious.
Now Ielpi, clearly emboldened, makes it plain that the IFC’s defeat was just the beginning. With him on the twentieth floor this morning is Michael Kuo, whose father, Frederick Kuo Jr., perished in the south tower and who is using his master’s degree in urban planning to help Ielpi with his latest project—the establishment of the Tribute Center, a tiny family-initiated visitor center opening soon, next door to the shrouded Deutsche Bank building. Staring out at a stirring, unobstructed view of the pit, the two men present their long-term wish list for all sixteen acres. First, they and the other members of Take Back the Memorial want a memorial that, unlike the current underground Arad design, would dominate the revived site, an unmissable reminder to all Americans of Ielpi’s and the other families’ darkest day. To that end, Take Back the Memorial would like to commandeer the proposed cultural building, or at least its parcel. If the group is successful, that would inflate the exhibition space for the World Trade Center Memorial and Museum to about four times that of the Holocaust Museum.
That’s not all. Next, Ielpi points out the outline of the Twin Towers’ foundations, which the families are fighting in court to have completely preserved, like a Roman ruin; to win that one, they would have to stop construction on the new Santiago Calatrava–designed PATH Terminal, which broke ground this month. To the northeast is the Gehry performing-arts-center site; some family members are uncomfortable with the idea of, as some have put it, dancing on the graves of victims. Then there’s the surrounding scheme for 600,000 square feet of retail space, which some families would like to screen for taste (no Victoria’s Secret, thank you)—and Larry Silverstein’s five planned commercial skyscrapers, including the Freedom Tower, the tenants of which the families may also have something to say about (Middle Eastern businesses, on ground zero?).
After the Avant-garde Sylvère Lotringer
One thing about the avant-garde is that it's mostly humorless. Dada is the glaring exception, but it never was a group to speak of; there were too many holes everywhere. Dada never took itself seriously, didn't even capitalize its name. Andre Breton and his men, on the other hand, capitalized on everything. Breton published the famous Anthology of Black Humor although had no sense of humor to speak of and was color blind. He was a totally uptight little man. Didn't he say that he would never show himself naked in front of a woman if he were not in a glorious state of erection? No wonder he kept his hair long and wore a cape. I don't think he would have ever dropped his pants in front of the Academy as Kafka's chimpanzee did. Kafka's monkey obviously had nothing glorious to show, or to prove, all he wanted was finding a way out , certainly not a way in. He'd been wounded and captured, so he copied human ways as monkeys do in order to be let out of his cage. He couldn't care less about the Academy, just repaid them in their own coin, showing them his ass in lieu of his wound. This is what the avant-garde is supposed to do, drop its pants in front of academies, and not lick their ass.
The avant-garde never monkeyed their way out of their cage. On the contrary, they tried everything to be admitted to the club . Why otherwise would they spend all their time abusing everybody around, like the Situationists? It wasn't exactly the way to keep their distance. The avant-garde wanted everyone to pay attention to them, especially those they attacked. In reality, they became the watchdog of the art world, its most indispensable appendage. It is not surprising then that it was rewarded posthumously. It was all a con-game. They were the bouncers of the art club, standing at the door and keeping the others waiting in the cold. The most exclusive and nasty they were, the more seductive. That's also what happened to French Theory in America. Everyone begged to be let in, terrorized at the thought that could be left out. And then they moved on to something else. They couldn't care less what it was all about and it didn't change anything in their lives. All they cared for was their glorious erection.
The Academy had no way of knowing whether the chimpanzee was candid or pulling their leg. That's what I like so much about humor - it remains imperceptible. The chimpanzee was playing with the code upheld by the Academy and they were too uptight to admit it, or even know for sure that he was challenging them. The real challenge that humor raises is its very existence. And even if it is recognized for what it is, there's nothing much one can do about it. You're damned if you do and damn if you don't. But this is what gets people thinking.
lori landay semiotics teaching notes
the new yorker
“ ‘The illusion of desire has been lost in the ambient pornography and contemporary art has lost the desire of illusion,’ ” he began. “ ‘After the orgies and the liberation of all desires, we have moved into the transsexual, the transparency of sex, with signs and images erasing all its secrets and ambiguity.’ ”
After he read, Baudrillard expanded on his theme. “We say that Disneyland is not, of course, the sanctuary of the imagination, but Disneyland as hyperreal world masks the fact that all America is hyperreal, all America is Disneyland,” he said. “And the same for art. The art scene is but a scene, or obscene”—he paused for chuckles from the audience—“mask for the reality that all the world is trans-aestheticized. We have no more to do with art as such, as an exceptional form. Now the banal reality has become aestheticized, all reality is trans-aestheticized, and that is the very problem. Art was a form, and then it became more and more no more a form but a value, an aesthetic value, and so we come from art to aesthetics—it’s something very, very different. And as art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, it joins with the banality of reality. Because all reality becomes aesthetical, too, then it’s a total confusion between art and reality, and the result of this confusion is hyperreality. But, in this sense, there is no more radical difference between art and realism. And this is the very end of art. As form.”
Mattress-to-mattress living turns private live into public theatre, and Jasmine, after settlin in, began hovering in corners and doorways to observe her neighbors. She was particularl interested in a middle-aged couple, Caroly Tompkins and Gus Davis, who, despite long residency in New Orleans East, had what others in the shelter called “country-ass ways. After a lifetime with a volatile mother, Jasmin is skittish; Carolyn and Gus mesmerized her with their placidity. He is illiterate, with failing eyesight, and had worked as an oysterman before Katrina and its accompanying oil spills Carolyn has a mellow laugh and, in Jasmine’ estimation, a woeful fashion sense: she wore faded house dress, pink flip-flops, and a blac polyester do-rag every day. The couple’s great interest was their sons, aged one and almost three, whom Carolyn rocked for hours in donated chair to which someone had affixed stickers that said “Wassup?
trailer group
Q: Can anyone tell me the name of the 60s or 70s post-rock group that recorded "Japanese Sandman?" This track of their recording contained the spoken message, "Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for l957 and..."
A: 'Im afraid I've found several music groups that have a song of that title. The main one being a Swing Jazz guy named Freddy Gardner and an individual named Djargo Rhinehardt. However these musicians are all in Jazz of some kind.
Although I wonder if you mean the group The Masked Marauders who did a song called I am the Japanese Sandman.
"Sherman set the Wayback Machine" is of course a reference to Mr. Peabody and his pet human Sherman from The Rocky and Bullwinkle show. (You never know, some people may miss the reference)
nola photo link farm
thanks mark
wtc in the noose
something of a shanty town quality to the port authority's plan for a shopping area at the foot of the freedom tower. no architect credited. is it me or is this cruddy looking and not appearing to belong to any master plan.
The Delta Blues’ deepest roots lay in the music of Africa. The music made its way to North America through the culture of the 15 to 20 million slaves brought during the 300 years of the slave trade. The majority of the slaves entering the Mississippi Delta were from West African tribes: Bantu, Yoruba, Ewe, and Akan. The music of these people is different, but do have recurring themes in all of them. The music is participative in call and response, drenched in oral history and tradition, and rhythmic pitch-tone fluctuations. While the vocal theme and methodology is primarily West African, the majority of the instrumentation has its beginnings in the savanna and Sahel zones of the Western Sudan. The main instrument of the West African coastal tribes was the drum, but the use of drums was outlawed during the early days of North American slavery, so the adaptation of savanna-derived string instruments came into prominence. The instruments were easily adaptable to English and Scot folk music, since all three relied on stringed instruments. These instruments were mainly two-string bowed and plucked lutes, griots, bania/halam, beta, and earth bow. Melodic lines are plucked by finger with these, in varying speeds and tone, to simulate the accompanying story being sung or chanted. The instruments crafted from local wood, and the string made from the gut of animals. This allowed for the relatively easy translation of instrumentation into early slave life. String instruments, at least of a certain type, were easy to make from local materials.
The tone and timbre of African music also reflects a great influence on the early blues. These aspects of the music centered on the playing style and accompaniment articles. Flattened notes and fluctuated tone, played to an upward drive in accordance with the drum rhythms, sound strikingly similar to pentatonic and heptatonic scales.
wildwood nj - appearing in a preservation magazines story. recently saw a good documentary on 13 titled "wildwood days." wildwood benefited from proximity to philly doo wop and then dick clarks bandstand rock and roll scene. in the summers it all moved to the shore with little beach-side rock palaces where major acts of the day performed a couple of hits in big review fashion. now they are knocking down the googie motels that remain.
heres a golden nugget / from this wildwood thread at lotta livin'
Few people in Congress are openly threatening to block money for reconstruction. More typical are sotto voce mumblings about whether federal money will be squandered through incompetence or graft by Louisiana officials. And some lawmakers have openly wondered whether each neighborhood in New Orleans needs to be rebuilt and protected with expensive floodwalls.
He is not romantic about human nature, however. When he talks about progress, he is careful to separate technological advance from, say, "ethics", which he says, smiling wryly, show no signs of improving. He was not surprised by the riots in the suburbs of Paris and he relates them to a misconception politicians have about the function of cities and their peripheries, which he believes have been vilely neglected by the planning authorities.renzo piano
After Paris, what can be done to improve the suburbs? This, he says, is the key question. "The big topic of today, and of the next 20 years, will be peripheries. How you can transform peripheries into a town. What is happening today in Paris is happening everywhere. It is mad, mad, and the insensitivity of people and politicians . . . They create ghettos. In Paris it is particularly bad. Now people are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries into cities. The peripheries are the cities that will be. Or not. Or will never be."
nyc gets its architectural act together
latest batch of emailed digital photos from jim louis in new orleans's 4th ward
(pics)this rumor was floating around the last couple of days but i waited for confirmation. i remember him from the 73-74 era band tuff darts which co-starred bobby (pre robert) gordon. a maxes KC band (which is to say pre cbgbs) that ushered in the neo-rockabilly phenom / any way he played guitar the way i liked to hear it. more proof that R and R isnt over when you turn 30 as some have put forward. he rocked till he died at age 76. rip.
Rock legend Link Wray dead to 76
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) – Guitar player Link Wray, who invented the power chord, the major modus operandi of modern rock guitarists, has died. He was 76.
A native of Dunn, North Carolina, Wray’s style is considered the blueprint for heavy metal and punk music. Wray’s is best known for his 1958 instrumental Rumble, 1959s “Rawhide” and 1963’s “Jack the Ripper.” His music has appeared in movies like “Pulp Fiction,” “Independence Day” and “Desperado.” His style is said to have inspired many other rock musicians, including Pete Townsend of the Who, but also David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Steve Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen have been quoted as saying that Wray and Rumble inspired them to become musicians. “He is the king; if it hadn’t been for Link Wray and ‘Rumble,’ I would have never picked up a guitar,” Townsend wrote on one of Wray’s albums. Neil Young once said: “If I could go back in time and see any band, it would be Link Wray and the Raymen.” The date of Wray’s death was not known. He lived in Copenhagen. Wray is survived by his wife and son.
from here
and you know record brother is on this with mp3s (including an oh so sweet "begin the beguine" sounding very much like a funeral march)
These came from an estate in Virginia where the man was a former police accident and crime scene photographer in the 1950s. He did not use a large fancy press camera; this was a rural area which did not have the benefit of the best equipment. The smaller pictures (3 1/2 x 3 1/2) appear to have been taken by a Brownie-type camera, The larger ones were taken by an early Polaroid. There are 32 in all, which show a variety of wrecks. There is body in a road and another of a person under a tree being covered up next to damaged cars. Several photos show policemen. There is nothing written on the backs. Photo quality is still sharp and clear. Interstesting, historical look at auto hazards in the pre-seat belt days.
nyc gridlock allert days:
-Friday, Nov. 18
-Wednesday, Nov. 23
-Thursday, Nov. 30
-Friday, Dec. 9
-Thursday, Dec. 15
-Friday, Dec. 16
-Wednesday, Dec. 21
-Thursday, Dec. 22
-Friday, Dec. 23
dylanisms
What we want is to put the rest of the world on the same level of masquerade and parody that we are on, to put the rest of the world into simulation, so all the world becomes total artifice and then we are all-powerful. It's a game. --jb
terry southern
first houses ave a and third street
This field has been the subject of intensive research and discussion over the last few years. Developmental psychologists now investigate the various ways in which children acquire their skills by copying their parents and peers, and the same issue arises in connection with the widely disputed subject of culture amongst primates and other animals. For instance, how, if at all, do chimps acquire their manual skills? But then, for that matter, how do human fashions spread? Is there really such a thing as a meme? What's involved in copying someone? What do we mean by impersonation? What is mimicry exactly? How do children acquire the accent of their region? How do parrots do so? How does culture determine what we decide to copy? How does social influence work and why is it that certain behaviors such as the high five spreads through one part of the community while leaving others unaffected? How does fashion work and what determines its influence and spread? What's the difference between imitation and emulation? How do living organisms acquire their protective invisibility by reproducing the visible appearance of their environment? What's the difference between concealment and disguise? And then of course there's the question of computers and robots. Can robots copy human behavior and to what extent are computers copies of ourselves?from here
this is me not going there / from here
Maybe it’s time to buy Larry Silverstein out of his lease, Bloomberg mused to the editorial board of the New York Daily News. Ten million square feet of high-end office space may ultimately provide the highest rent for World Trade Center developer Silverstein, but it will require government subsidies and a potentially long wait because there’s neither enough insurance money nor a strong enough commercial office market to build it all now. Instead, why not get going faster and with fewer subsidies and a different mix of office, residential, retail and public space. “I think it’s time to see what the marketplace really wants and perhaps we can better accommodate that,” Bloomberg innocently remarked.
But Duchamp, if not a chess grandmaster, was certainly far beyond average in his passion for the game and its theories. He was obsessed with chess problems and, in 1932, actually co-wrote a book on the game about obscure and unlikely endgame situations called "Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled." And Duchamp got together with another chess-loving refugee from Europe, Max Ernst. Ernst, it seems, did not have the same kind of fascination with chess theory as Duchamp. He saw the game in more mythic terms: the clash of armies, the authority of royal figures, the weird metamorphosis of symbolic beings - part bird, part human, part fish - in other words, as a field in which the hybrid forms of his own painting and sculpture could also be displayed.
A head of its time" can be more than a figure of speech. The phrase is literally true of a house designed by the architect, painter and sculptor Tony Smith in 1951. The house - which is located in a former granite quarry overlooking Long Island Sound in Guilford, Conn., and which was designed for Fred Olsen, an art collector, and his wife, Florence - is not futuristic. It displays none of the sci-fi fixations that 20th-century designers used to thrust into public consciousness when called upon to visualize 21st-century life. But the Olsen House waited nearly 50 years to acquire two owners perceptive enough to appreciate Smith's original concept and an architect sensitive enough to resurrect it from decades of aesthetic disregard. Spared at the last minute from the wrecking ball, the house has re-emerged as a model dwelling for life in the year 2005.from nyt fall design magazine
For the 1984 Issey Miyake boutique in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York, he created a variation on his famous “Star Terrazzo”in which he updated a traditional flooring material by mixing shards of multicolored glass into concrete. In this case the shards were broken Coca-Cola bottles and the terrazzo was extended to cover many surfaces, serving not only for flooring, but also for columns and thin wall panels through which light passed to create a jewel-like glow.schwarz worked for bg at the time and observed the installation of the IM boutique. beautiful. sadly no web pics available.
Mayor Ray Nagin did not name an architect or planner to his 17-member “Bring New Orleans Back” commission on rebuilding. But, he appointed Joseph Canizaro, a local real estate mogul who has developed more than $1 billion in projects, to lead the committee on land use. The mayor later named Reed Kroloff, dean at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, and Ray Manning, AIA, a local architect, to co-chair the subcommittee on urban design. Peter Trapolin, AIA, another local architect, has been chosen to chair the subcommittee on preservation. And, the commission has appointed Philadelphia-based Wallace, Roberts & Todd to devise a temporary master plan for rebuilding the city.
The Bring New Orleans Back Commission was established to resolve conflicting visions of reconstruction, to help decide how to spend federal relief dollars, restart a crippled economy and rebuild neighborhoods. Among the 17 commissioners are a few religious and cultural figures—including musician Winton Marsalis—but most commissioners represent business interests. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco’s Louisiana Recovery Authority, which currently does not include any planners or architects, will name its own task force on rebuilding, according to AIA COO Jim Dinegar. He says the authority has approached the AIA for appointment recommendations.
It wants the government to set up spore testing sites as New Orleans starts to gut mouldy buildings and the spores are released into homes and into the air.
"The outdoor mould spore concentrations could easily trigger serious allergic or asthmatic reactions in sensitive people," said Dr. Gina Solomon of the Natural Resources Defence Council.
"The indoor air quality was even worse, rendering the homes we tested dangerously uninhabitable by any definition."
The group tested 14 sites in the New Orleans area for mould spores over a three-day period in mid-October, some six weeks after Hurricane Katrina flooded large parts of the city.
They reported spore counts as high as 645,000 spores per 1 cubic metre (35 cu ft) inside a building in the badly flooded Uptown area, and levels up to 102,000 spores per cubic metre in the air.
Solomon said a normal level would be about 25,000 spores per cubic metre, and the National Allergy Bureau views outdoor mould counts above 50,000 as "very high."
Solomon said her group was testing again this week, and those results, due in a couple of weeks, would show if mould levels were subsiding, or if repair work was releasing more spores into the air.
"I do not anticipate that New Orleans will be a mouldy city forever, but as long as there is this much mould growing, and all this work going on, the mould is going to be stirred up, and people with allergies need to be concerned," she said.
This story also led us to the streets. We called our colleague, Steve Edwards at WBEZ, to see if he could help us locate any hidden grills in Chicago. He contacted The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, which in turn put us in touch with Jeffrey Newton. Jeffry has been homeless or in shelters most all his life, from boy's homes, to reformatories, to prison by age 17. Then he moved out on the streets, where every day he goes "trailblazing" -- looking for food, shelter, work, the resources he needs to make it through the day.kitchen sisters / hidden kitchens
Jeffry learned to cook from his grandmother. He feels an urge to cook, especially for other people -- under the overpass on Chicago's Wacker Drive; on a George Foreman Grill plugged into a power pole; with a hot clothing iron to toast a grilled cheese sandwich.
In fact, Goldfinger was a modernist. In a not-so-subtle piece of social criticism, Ian Fleming took the name of his most villainous character from a Marxist architect, Erno Goldfinger, known for dramatic high-rise residential towers whose forms echoed the reduced, brutal lines of grain silos and cement factories. Like many Britons, Fleming was appalled by the way buildings like Goldfinger's were transforming London's 19th-century skyline. Prince Charles continues this crusade against the "monstrous carbuncles" of modernist design to this day.
I've been thinking about this stuff recently because I'm in Italy again, staying in an apartment in that retro-Renaissance city, Venice, with only techno-dystopian DVDs like Blade Runner and Until The End of the World to while away the hours (it's been a bit rainy). I've also been to Milan, where I saw a wonderful exhibition called Inventing the Future, a retrospective about the work of industrial designer Joe Colombo, who died of a heart attack on his 41st birthday in 1971.
Colombo's last project interested me the most: the Total Furnishing Unit developed for the 1972 MOMA exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.
Influenced by the space program, the Total Furnishing Unit was a capsule for Earth living, a 28-square meter "habitat cell" consisting of kitchen, cupboard, bed and bathroom, all made of molded plastic, ready to be arranged as an all-in-one living solution -- a kind of capsule pod -- at the center of an open-plan space.
Resourceful environmental leaders have unearthed opportunity amidst the wreckage left behind by this year's record hurricane season and the battering of the Gulf Coast. They've crafted plans for everything from the building of new, green, affordable housing to the tightening of auto fuel-economy standards.
Of course, powerful people with less eco-friendly agendas have seen opportunity too. In their eyes, the devastating storms were not-so-green lights to fast-track brown legislation.
Such efforts to exploit the hurricanes for different political ends will no doubt continue as the process of rebuilding New Orleans and other devastated communities stretches over years or decades.
Here we examine 17 proposals -- both pro- and anti-environment -- that flooded in soon after Katrina and Rita, and offer predictions for their success.
In the weeks since President George Bush’s speech in New Orlean’s Jackson Square, in which he promised to spare no effort in rebuilding the area, FEMA has alarmingly failed to advance any plan for the return of evacuees to temporary housing within the city or to connect displaced locals with reconstruction jobs. In fact, new barriers are being erected against their return. In Mississippi’s ruined coastal cities, as well as in metropolitan New Orleans, landlords, galvanized by rumors of gentrification and soaring land values, are beginning to institute mass evictions. (Although the oft-cited Lower Ninth Ward is actually a bastion of blue-collar homeownership, most poor New Orleanians are renters.)
Civil-rights lawyer Bill Quigley has described how renters have returned “to find furniture on the street and strangers living in their apartments at higher rents, despite an order by the Governor that no one can be evicted before October 25. Rents in the dry areas have doubled and tripled.”
Secretary of Housing Alfonso Jackson, meanwhile, seems to be working to fulfill his notorious prediction that New Orleans is “not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.” Charlestine Jones, spokesperson for the Forest Park Tenants Association, recently protested that the agencies in charge of these housing complexes, including HUD, “are using allegations of storm damage to these complexes as a pretext for expelling working-class African-Americans, in a blatant attempt to co-opt our homes and sell them to developers to build high-priced housing.”
Minority homeowners also face relentless pressures not to return. Insurance compensation, for example, is typically too small to allow homeowners in the eastern wards of New Orleans to rebuild if and when authorities re-open their neighborhoods.
Similarly, the Small Business Administration—so efficient in recapitalizing the San Fernando Valley in the aftermath of the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake—has so far dispensed only a few million dollars despite increasingly desperate pleas from tens of thousands of homeowners and small businesspeople facing imminent foreclosure or bankruptcy.
In fact, brokers say, many New Orleans houses are commanding higher-than-pre-Katrina prices, largely because of a shortage of habitable dwellings. True, the speculation that occurred in nearby cities like Baton Rouge (where prices shot up as much as 30 percent after the storm) hasn't come to New Orleans.
But undamaged homes in desirable neighborhoods are bringing in 5 to 10 percent more than they did in August before the hurricane hit, according to Arthur Sterbcow, president of Latter & Blum Realtors, the city's oldest real estate brokerage firm.
At the same time, in parts of the city devastated by the storm, no one is making offers yet, brokers say, while attendance at open houses is way down.
neutra's cyclorama building at gettysburg and the painted solders once inside
secret garden of the high line
ballad of fat elvis
ref sony root-kit
EFF has confirmed the presence of XCP on the following titles (each has a data session, easily read on a Macintosh, that includes a file called "VERSION.DAT" that announces what version of XCP it is using). If you have one of these CDs, and you have a Windows PC (Macs are totally immune, as usual), you may have caught the XCP bug.
The crux of the debate is this: When you buy a song, an album, or a movie, are you buying the content only in the form it comes in? If you purchase a song from Apple's iTunes store, should you be able to play it on any hardware you want? Not according to Apple, which bundles each download with a "digital rights management" scheme called FairPlay. When you pay 99 cents for the latest Sheryl Crow hit, it's stored on your hard drive as an encrypted file. Every time you play it on your computer with iTunes or on your iPod, it is unlocked with a random encryption key supplied by Apple. FairPlay allows you to load a song on up to five computers and an unlimited number of iPods and burn as many CDs as you please. But you can't e-mail a song to a friend, you can't distribute it over the Web, and you can't play it on anything but iTunes or an iPod.
Debra Burlingame doesn’t live in New York [City], and her brother didn’t die there. Her agenda is based on emotion and the righteous rage of loss. She is not considering the life of New Yorkers, but the loss of life surrounding her. Pataki and Clinton are both looking at 2008 presidential bids, their conservative rhetoric are pre-campaign insurances that they can ride the neo-conservative wave to the White House. Again, there is no consideration for the people of New York or the cultural future of Manhattan. What Pataki, Clinton and Burlingame are responsible for through their shortsighted opportunism is cultural death in Lower Manhattan.
The controversy promises to erupt on Thursday at 7 p.m. at the New York Public Library's Celeste Bartos Forum, when the debate will be joined by members of the guild, the publishers' association and Google. Also in the fray will be Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School, Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired Magazine, and Paul LeClerc and David Ferriero from the library (which is participating in Google Print).
But as I argued in a version of this column in The International Herald Tribune last month, contention is commonplace during eras of technological change. When Defoe and Addison were demanding consideration in London 300 years ago, the right to "copy" or publish any book was held not by the author but by members of London's Stationers' Company - booksellers and printers - who held a monopoly on that right in perpetuity. That seemed reasonable during the century after the introduction of the printing press and the considerable expenses needed to print, distribute and sell a book to the small literate public.
But by the beginning of the 18th century, printing was becoming less expensive, international and provincial publishers were offering competition, literacy increased and authors grew in public stature. So over the next half-century, British laws limited the control of the Stationers and expanded the rights of authors, while also putting time limits on all forms of control, creating what became the public domain.
Then came another wave of technological change: the industrial revolution. And similar controversies erupted. Inventions were once relatively immune from copying because of the craft they required; execution could seem more difficult than coming up with the idea. Once manufacturing was mechanized, though, the idea itself could become vulnerable, leading to both increased governmental control and increased industrial espionage. Britain prohibited the export of machinery while the fledgling United States welcomed insiders with information from there.
In the '50s Kurtzman's MAD magazine was Lenny Bruce for kids. As a comic book it was the comics inside out, all id, and going too fast for kids to catch, especially around the edges of the panels. Nine- and twelve-year-olds picking their way through the 1954 Dragnet parody "Dragged Net" weren't going to connect the question that Sgt. Joe Friday continually asked his partner Ed Saturday—"How's your mom, Ed?"—with Oedipus, and there was no Oedipus Rex payoff. That wasn't the point.
The point was "How's your mom, Ed?" as absolute non sequitur. What in the world did it mean? The phrase turned every already-crowded, hysterical page into a mystery, put a hole in it. There was the suggestion that there was more going on in the comics you read and the TV shows you watched than you would ever know.
Someone has stolen one of my buildings! That was the panicked reaction of Beverly Moss Spatt, then the chairwoman of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, after the cast-iron facades of a building by James Bogardus were spirited away from a downtown lot in 1974. The 1849 facades, supposedly protected by official landmark status, had been disassembled and stored for eventual relocation at another site. But thieves broke into the lot and sold most of them off as scrap metal.
Three decades later, Ms. Spatt, now retired, is one of the people fighting to save 2 Columbus Circle, a 1965 building by Edward Durell Stone, in one of the biggest preservation uproars in a generation. But this time it is the commission itself that seems to have been hijacked.
Once considered the most powerful agency of its kind, the commission has lost the confidence of many mainstream preservationists by repeatedly refusing to hold a public hearing on the building's fate. At the urging of those preservation advocates, a city councilman, Bill Perkins, has introduced a bill that could force the commission to hold public hearings on potential landmarks. The implication is that the commission cannot always be trusted to protect the public interest.
One of the Crescent City's most notable New Urbanism proponents is Pres Kabacoff, chief operating officer of Historic Restoration Inc., a development company principally known for converting unused industrial dinosaurs, such as the American Can Co. and the Federal Fiber Mills buildings, into apartment hives, with coffee shops, restaurants, dry cleaners, wine shops, workout centers, swimming pools and other on-site yuppie amenities -- a sort of old urban/New Urban synthesis.times-picayune
But Kabacoff's post-Katrina vision includes more than inner-city conversions. His dreams run to a series of 10-acre, freshly built, densely populated New Urban enclaves between downtown New Orleans and Armstrong airport -- each of them a bit like one of his more controversial accomplishments: the conversion of the old St. Thomas public housing site into River Garden apartments, a mixed-income development replete with its own Wal-Mart Supercenter and, one day, a nursing home.
cargo culture
the jazz church at citicorp is the kind of multi/non denominational sacred space that i would envision for the ground zero memorial. no propaganda. just a place to pray and no one telling you what to play.
The new St. Peter's church building is shaped abstractly like two hands held together in prayer, with large vertical windows offering passersby glimpses into its interior and the Erol Beker Chapel that contains a large sculptural wall by Louise Nevelson. The church was well known for its jazz programs under the Rev. Ralph E. Peterson, and those programs have continued after its rebuilding.
Frank Gehry's forthcoming performing arts center at the World Trade Center site, already indefinitely delayed, looks like it may get Freedom Center'd (née Drawing Center'd). David Dunlap reports in the Times that at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation board meeting yesterday, he got the inkling that—since construction costs are rising—the performing arts center might have to duke it out with the memorial for funds.TBTM poll: which would you choose?
If given a choice between building a "cultural arts center" OR building the 9/11 Memorial and 9/11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center site, which would you choose?
BETHLEHEM, Pa. A full decade after the shuttering of Bethlehem Steel’s flagship plant, officials are rolling out their latest proposal to transform and resurrect the nation’s largest abandoned industrial site: an arts complex called “SteelStax.”
The 17-story blast furnaces that have dominated the city’s skyline for a century would tower over new performance spaces for music, dance and theater.
big D MCMs
bravia super-ball ad
via zoller
sofa thread
the silver paintings
This is a dangerous moment for an architect. The cultists who have followed her for so long have a habit of getting nervous once the public come to enjoy what was once their private preserve. In some quarters, Daniel Libeskind's critical reputation has never recovered since he made the egregious mistake of becoming popular. Will Zaha Hadid suffer the same fate?
At Christie's on Tuesday night, a photograph by Richard Prince broke two records: for his works at auction, and for any photograph at auction. Last night's sale featured three works by the artist, all from Mr. Mugrabi. "Untitled (Cowboys)," from 1993, one of Mr. Prince's images of the Marlboro Man, was expected to sell for $600,000 to $800,000. What a difference four years - and 24 hours - can make. While an an 1989 cowboy photograph set the records at Christie's, selling for $1.2 mllion, there was no bid in sight for last night's cowboys. A 1980 fashion photograph also failed to sell.
Mr. Prince fared better with one of his paintings of naughty nurses. Aby Rosen, the real estate developer, bought "Mountain Nurse" (2003) for $744,000, in the middle of its $600,00 to $800,000 estimate.
her noise
oh my god
via vz
Atlanta — The Italian architect Renzo Piano is in the process of rewriting the book on American museum architecture. Well, it might be more accurate to say he's rewriting the book on museum expansions: His firm, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, has additions in the works at a remarkable number of the most prominent museums in the country, including the Whitney in New York, the Gardner in Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago. And, of course, there's his reconfiguration of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and its muddled collection of buildings along Wilshire Boulevard, the first phase of which will open in 2007.
Planners from around the country have already descended on the Gulf Coast region, beginning a series of charrettes to shape the future of land use and community development in the devastated region. Yet are the local residents -- especially those who need the most help -- ready to make plans? Leonardo Vazquez argues that more careful, long-term planning is needed to ensure that current residents and refugees alike are given the stake and voice they need in the rebuilding efforts.
The only Prairie-style house Frank Lloyd Wright designed and built in Ohio opened its doors to the public for the first time on Oct. 15 after undergoing a $5.8 million restoration.
Francie Rehwald wanted her mountainside house to be environmentally friendly and to be "feminine," to have curves. "I'm a gal," says the 60-year-old retiree.
Her architect had an idea: Buy a junked 747 and cut it apart. Turn the wings into a roof, the nose into a meditation temple. Use the remaining scrap to build six more buildings, including a barn for rare animals. He made a sketch.
Rebuilding any city is a complicated business. As soon as the flood waters began to subside in New Orleans, suggestions for what to do with a devastated city started coming from everywhere. Two local citizens suggest twenty points of entry.via metropolis
speaking of scams. some may know that schwarz was born in new orleans way back in 1955. my dad told me about the the "I bet i know where you got dem shoes" routine, so i was prepared when i was walking down the bowery one day and this guy came up and said "I bet i know where you got dem shoes."
you never know whats in a factory sealed box. i know of several people who bought a factory wrapped brick in a sony box off the street here in nyc in the 80's. im sure that scam is still around and what they really bought was an invaluable life lesson for one hundred dollars which is cheep if you dont do it twice. buyer beware. check out this nasty factory wrapped shit from a new orleans metro blogger.
yes, we are following fellow blogger Jim Louis's posted reports from new orleans on his email from nola blog.
we are also posting the digital photo e.mail attachments he's sending in. mostly images of his neighborhood in the fourth ward.
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 7 - Something once unimaginable has begun to happen here: the United Parcel Service is delivering again downtown. At Langenstein's grocery, celery and pork chops are moving out the door, and revelers spill out of the Magazine Street bars on Friday nights.
But just a mile away, workers are struggling to restore some flood protection to the city, which would barely stay dry in even a modest tropical storm. Tens of thousands of homeowners, facing six-figure repair bills for their rotting houses, are unlikely to get more than a fraction of that from the government. As phones ring in empty offices, even the shrimp business can barely find customers, and the economy remains comatose.
[...]
Will New Orleans be granted a vastly strengthened flood protection system - at a cost of up to $20 billion - or will it be told to allow low-lying residential neighborhoods to return to marshland? Will the city have to take control of thousands of houses to restore them - at a cost that no one has calculated - or will it have to tell thousands of evacuated residents not to return?
Every major decision seems to rely on another decision that has to be made first, and no one has stepped in to announce what the city will do and break the cycle of uncertainty. Many residents and business owners will not return and invest without an assurance of flood protection, for example. But workers who could rebuild the levees and much of the rest of the city are hampered by the lack of housing.
The definition of art is not something that anyone would lightly undertake. Nor would it normally be left to a US customs official to decide. But that is exactly what happened in October 1926 when Marcel Duchamp arrived on the New York dockside accompanying 20 modernist masterpieces from Brancusi's studio that were destined for selling exhibitions in New York and Chicago. Duchamp at that time had given up art in favour of chess, and was trying to eke out a living by art-dealing with his friend Henri-Pierre Roché, mainly in Brancusi.
The point was that ordinary merchandise was subject to duty at 40 per cent, while art was not. And the customs official on duty at the time happened to be an amateur sculptor – just the sort of person to have bumptiously confident views about matters aesthetic. He took one look at the Brancusis, concluded that they weren't art, and levied $4,000 duty.
Two months after Hurricane Katrina displaced more than 1 million people, problems with federal housing aid threaten to spawn a new wave of homelessness.
In Texas, thousands of evacuees who found shelter in apartments face eviction threats because rents are going unpaid.
In Louisiana, some evacuees are beginning to show up in homeless shelters because they haven't received federal aid or don't know how to get it.
Advocates for the poor say the situation will worsen this winter.
“They are the poorest folks … and they are the ones who are going to be left with nothing,” says Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “It's going to show up at homeless shelters this winter.”
The housing crunch could get tighter in November, because the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) wants to move an estimated 200,000 Katrina evacuees out of hotels as soon as possible.
That increases the need for apartments, trailers and mobile homes.
Pressure is building on FEMA to alter its policies. Two programs provide rent money directly to evacuees or reimburse local governments. But many evacuees have not received the cash or have used it for other needs. And some cities refuse to spend their own money up front.
It was 1895. Wright, twenty-eight, had only recently set up his own practice, after being fired by Louis Sullivan for taking on outside commissions on the sly. [Marion] Mahony, herself, had recently been dismissed from the employ of her cousin, Chicago architect Dwight Perkins, during an economic downturn.
It can be argued that it was Mahony's distinctive renderings that created the public face that helped Wright's work command attention throughout the world. It could be speculated that Wright's work, itself, was influenced by Mahony's role in the spirited exchanges of ideas that went on in his studio, yet she is one a series of pioneering women architects and designers who have disappeared into the deep shadow of their male associates - Lill Reich in that of Mies van der Rohe, Aino Aalto in that of Alvar Aalto, and Mahony, in that of both Wright and her husband Walter Burley Griffin. Observes Jeanne Gang, part of a very different and more indelible generation of women architects, “They seem to get erased.”
rip e stewart williams desert modernist
Streaking at sporting events is generally thought to have begun in 1974, when a 25- year-old Australian accountant named Michael O'Brien ran naked onto the pitch at Twickenham Stadium in London during a soccer match between France and England. That event was being televised live, but it was perhaps a still image in the papers of an English bobby covering Mr. O'Brien's private parts that is most remembered.
43-man squamish
1st sunday nov 05 jcnj
The Architects Collaborative (TAC)
toh goes to visit six moon hill
Robert Philip's Performing Music in the Age of Recording is a brilliant analysis of how this has affected performance style. It is also incidentally, for much of the time, the best account I know of how musical life in general has changed since the introduction of vinyl and long-playing records in the 1950s, which made it possible for records to invade everyone's home. But it starts even further back with the end of the nineteenth century, when recording was invented by Thomas Edison, who recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into his new machine. The book is full of fascinating detail cogently presented on rehearsal practices and standards, recording on piano rolls, the different instruments used in orchestras, the way records are edited, and the contrasting musical ideals of performers. Philip is large-minded, tolerant, and sympathetic to various positions, and consistently judicious.
His main thesis is that recording has directed performance style into a search for greater precision and perfection, with a consequent loss of spontaneity and warmth. Various expressive devices once common in the early twentieth century have been almost outlawed: "portamento" (sliding from one note to another on a stringed instrument); playing the piano with the hands not quite together (Philip calls this dislocation); arpeggiating chords (not playing all the notes of the chord at the same time but one after another), and flexibility of tempo.
In retrospect, the fate of the Freedom Center may have been sealed three years ago with the decision to create a clearly defined parallelogram, bordered by four streets, in which both the memorial and a cultural complex were to sit. Since this was the site of the twin towers, it may have been inevitable that the block would be seen as hallowed.
Gretchen Dykstra, the president of the memorial foundation, which will build and own the memorial and cultural buildings, said the governor had now "provided clear direction that the memorial quadrant should be devoted to telling the story of Sept. 11th."
"Memorial quadrant"?? If only the limits of this farce were as clearly delineated. How is that quadrant any more "hallowed" than the other eight-plus acres of the site? It seems like only yesterday that the "footprints" were the sacred squares that had to be defended at all costs.
How and by whom was this quadrant defined? By the MTA, who cordoned it off in an effort to keep its sacred revenue stream as more than just a memory. And to whom are the MTA and its proxy, the LMDC, beholden? To the governor who just undid their three year's work on the IFC and the master plan "in a stroke."
The town house as a building type in fact reaches back to Crete and Pompeii, a city built almost entirely of these narrow-fronted single-family structures. Le Corbusier describes them in great detail in his 1923 Towards a New Architecture. He admired them for the great variety of space and light they allowed within a standardized plan, which fit in with his theories about the potential industrialization of housing, and the relationship of the part to the whole in the house and the city. Leon Battista Alberti and Andrea Palladio also wrote at length about town houses, and in his 1516 socialist tract Utopia, Renaissance scholar Sir Thomas Moore described his ideal city Amaurote as composed of town houses: “The houses be of fair and gorgeous building, and on the street side they stand joined together in a long row through the whole street without any partition or separation.”
As a former Dutch colony, New York City inherited the town house type originally from Amsterdam, though the local variations derive equally from London precedents. The stoop is of Dutch origin, while the common half-level dropped floor is drawn from the London type. These references persisted—perhaps too persistently. From the massive construction of brownstones and classical townhouses in New York in the late 19th and early 20th century, one can count one hand the number of modernist takes on the town house. There’s the glass block front of the Lescaze House of 1937 on the Upper East Side; the lacy stone façade of Edward Durrell Stone’s own uptown house; George Nelson’s streamlined Fairchild House of 1941 at 17 East 65th Street; Philip Johnson’s Miesian Rockefeller Guest House of 1950, in Midtown; and Morris Lapidus’ home and office at 256 East 29th Street, of 1950. The great breakthrough in modern town houses in New York are the ones by Paul Rudolph, primarily his own mirrored extravaganza, designed in 1972, overlooking the East River.
Governor George Pataki removed the International Freedom Center last month before L.M.D.C. or the public could weigh in on the museum’s content. Pataki’s decision — a response to calls from some victims’ family members to limit cultural activities in the memorial quadrant — evoked the resignation of L.M.D.C. board member Roland Betts.this new term "memorial quadrant" seems to be part of a recent re-branding of the "foot print" or "the basin" identification of the area formerly known as ground zero. this has all the looks of a common land grab. extending the boarders of the ground zero memorial to include the entire basin as sanctified land and an attempt to restrict who has a say about what happens there driven by a small but aggressive conservative group identifying them selves as "an alliance of 15 major 9/11 family groups" under the voodoo charm of debra burlingame and her take back the memorial website (and who ever else that entails).
Betts, one of the original — and most influential — members of L.M.D.C. board and a close friend of President George W. Bush, quietly handed in his resignation letter last week. At his final L.M.D.C. board meeting, Betts told fellow board members, “There’s no question that L.M.D.C. has been deeply wounded here,” according to the New York Times.
L.M.D.C. has been hemorrhaging employees since president Kevin Rampe resigned last May. The new L.M.D.C. president, Stefan Pryor, wields far less power than Rampe because on the day Pryor was promoted, Pataki appointed his right hand man, John Cahill, as Downtown redevelopment czar, a position that reports directly to the governor.
Since the spring, many of the key staffers surrounding the 130 Liberty St. deconstruction have bowed out, including Amy Peterson, who directed the deconstruction plans, L.M.D.C. spokesperson Joanna Rose, who took a post as Pataki’s spokesperson and Kate Millea, who developed the controversial community action plan.
a clueless jeff jarvis/buzzmachine on the demise of the IFC
Will the cultural and performing arts centers at the new World Trade Center ever be built, or have the plans been tossed out with the International Freedom Center? When NY1 sought out answers from Gretchen Dykstra last week, the Memorial Foundation’s president and C.E.O. ducked the question a few times.
The future of the cultural buildings has come into doubt since Governor George Pataki summarily removed the International Freedom Center, a museum planned for the Snohetta-designed cultural center, from the W.T.C. master plan last month. Pataki dropped the museums after some victims’ family members criticized the proposed content. With the Freedom Center gone and the Drawing Center, a Soho-based museum also slated for the cultural center, searching for a new home, the fate of the Snohetta building is anything but certain.
The alliance of 15 major 9/11 family groups calls upon the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and its chairman, John Whitehead, to move forward with Governor George E. Pataki’s historic mandate that the World Trade Center Memorial and memorial quadrant be solely devoted to honoring the victims and heroes of September 11, 2001 and telling the story of that day and of those who came to our aid, as well as the story of the first attack on the Trade Center in 1993.15 major 9/11 family groups want the memorial quadrant...
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We urge the LMDC to give the American people what they want, deserve and are contributing to by their tax dollars and private donations: a memorial which honors the lost, tells the true and inspiring history of that day and conveys a message of hope which survives the survivors. We believe that story would fill several Snohetta buildings. Further, we urge the LMDC to turn over all curatorial decisions pertaining to the memorial quadrant to the institution responsible for building, operating and paying for the memorial: the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.
via tbtm
s for santiago? i noticed the serpentine foundation forms from the path train yesterday. just one thing:
There is a potential snag, however. A lawsuit filed last month by the Coalition of 9/11 Families seeks to halt the project on the ground that it violates a federal law requiring that historic sites not be used for transportation projects unless there are no feasible or prudent alternatives.
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."
the highest form of humor: PUNZ
For a time, the dust seemed to be everywhere, from the insides of downtown apartments to the very air that New Yorkers breathed. It is suspected of causing respiratory problems and may have long-term effects on health.
Most of the dust was swept up long ago, but small amounts of it doubtless remain, tucked in nooks and corners. Federal environmental officials had planned to test living and working places in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn this year to make sure they are not still contaminated.
But the project has been stalled in part because even though the dust was seen, smelled or inhaled by millions of New Yorkers four years ago, there is no consensus about how to identify it today.
Lincoln Park West [Jersey City] is an area badly in need of tidying up, said Fred Mumford, a spokesman for the DEP. Mumford explained that the wetlands on the edge of the park were used for decades as a dumping site for solid, liquid and hazardous waste. Invasive plants ran rampant in the wetlands, smothering natural growth and the water, he said.
In addition, the wildlife and plants in the 31-acre marsh have been contaminated by several oil spills in Newark Bay, such as the Exxon Bayway spill in the Kill Van Kull in 1990, which released 567,000 gallons of oil into Newark Bay and into the marshes.
Some $500,000 in remediation money from that and other polluters that went into the New Jersey Responsible Polluters fund provided the initial funding to clean up the wetlands.
While the Lincoln Park clean-up is still in its early stages - design drafts have just been drawn and Jersey City will seek bids for a contractor early next year - the plans are ambitious.
"We will be flushing tidal water into the creek system and building new tidal channels," said Carl Alderman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is assisting with the clean-up. "We will be rebuilding a wetlands site that had previously been used as a landfill . removing landfill debris, planting salt grass."
Hudson County also has plans to revitalize the PJB landfill at the edge of Lincoln Park.
asymptote (click to launch pop-up - like thats a good thing?)
Is the LMDC Getting the Boot?\\via TBTM
The NY Times article regarding Tom Bernstein’s resignation seems to suggest that something may be in the works regarding the LMDC’s role in decision making for the memorial quadrant.
calling it what it isnt :
The Center would have addressed slavery and other human rights issues not directly related to the craven attacks on the World Trade Center. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov had a word for the kind of political correctness behind the center: poshlost, a Russian term meaning fashionable, Philistine, clichéd, bogus nonsense. The instance he gave in the late 1940s, in which Philistinism tumbled over the edge into evil, was: “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” The subtext at the Center was: “We all share in radical Islam’s guilt. They killed many Americans, but we had slaves; there was genocide in Western Europe; whose hands are that clean, anyway?”
75 years in the ghost busters building on cpw
via nym real estate section
schnabel towers
two young golden rain trees after about eleven months in JC soil
anyone know anything about the flypen?
She agreed and tugged at her son to come inside, when the reporters hollered at her to wait. She held up her hands. "Please don't take pictures. I don't look decent." They aimed the lens at her. She crossed her arms over herself. "Please."
The cameras clicked and clicked. She stopped asking and pressed her mouth into a grim line. They would not give her the dignity she asked for because degradation sells papers. The most valuable thing she had was her tragedy.
Would those photos haunt her? Would she be reminded of her helplessness? Before coming to New Orleans I was surrounded by images of myself that scared me. During the summer my own reflection scared me. I saw a man whose ex-girlfriend would not take his calls, whose family was broken by pride and silence, whose mother was dying from overwork while he wrote poetry. I thought the time and money and sweat I gave to the poor would return an image of me as a decent man. It would be my reward. Instead I saw how small a part of their burden I could carry.
It is in fact Warhol who drew me to Pittsburgh. I was lured here by a Web site launched in May by the Andy Warhol Museum. The site (www.warhol.org/tc21) is itself a form of cultural time travel; it makes the contents of one of Warhol's Time Capsules accessible to Internet users. Largely unknown until the artist's death in 1987, the Time Capsules were the 612 cardboard boxes that he filled with the stuff that he accumulated--the by-products of art, life, and fame. Warhol used to keep a box by his desk and toss things in: correspondence, receipts, newspaper clippings, photographs, and gifts. Some of the things were so minor that anyone else would have simply thrown them away. One capsule, archivist Matthew Wrbican tells me, contained hunks of insect-infested pizza dough. Why? No one knows. Some things were so significant--letters from Mick Jagger, a paint palette used by Salvador Dalí--that anyone else would have put them carefully away, but Warhol dropped his overflow in cardboard boxes that were each taped shut, dated, and placed in storage by an assistant.
proud mary (the recording contract from hell)
"You know, maybe it happens in 'Cinderella,' but it doesn't in real life, where those people buy a company and then turn around and give it away," he said, "even though I am the main inventor of the property that generates all that wealth. I'm the guy that wrote and sang all those songs, and arranged and produced the records. So sometimes there's a lot of irony within my being. It's like, 'Gee, everybody's all excited about something that basically came out of one guy - me!' "
He builds houses out of sand, beer crates, even paper - and he's just been chosen to create the Pompidou's new outpost. Steve Rose meets Shigeru Ban.
Shigeru Ban is not your average architect. You can tell this before you even open the door to his Paris office, because to get to that door, you have to ascend to the top of the Pompidou Centre and out on to the roof terrace. There, Ban is stationed in a sort of elongated covered wagon, which clings to the high-tech structure like a parasite. Inside, the office reveals itself to be the near-opposite of its host building: rather than industrial steel and giant ducts, it is made of synthetic sheeting, timber and cardboard tubes.
"I just asked the president of the Pompidou Centre as a joke if he would lend me the roof terrace for my temporary office," Ban calmly explains. "I needed to rent space somewhere in Paris, and it's good to be close to the client."
more current emailed image files from jim louis in new orleans's fourth ward