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When New Orleans musicians play the old songs, what once came across as easygoing now carries a streak of bravado. Like other New Orleanians, many musicians have lost their homes, possessions and sometimes family members, and they are traveling long distances to play in their old local haunts. A song like "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" now echoes with the knowledge that some natives of the city will never return. And there are new, bleaker resonances when a Mardi Gras Indian group like the Wild Magnolias sings the traditional song "Shallow Water Oh Mama," or when a brass band picks up the bouncy "It Ain't My Fault."
Vaughan's, a club in the Upper Ninth Ward, is too small for a stage. Mr. Ruffins, a trumpeter, has returned to his regular Thursday gig there after a long hiatus imposed by the storm, and he and his band were nearly backed against the club's wall by the dancing crowd. He was playing and singing old New Orleans songs like "Mardi Gras Mambo," with a jovial Louis Armstrong growl. Yet no one, onstage or off, has forgotten that the Lower Ninth Ward, still in ruins, is only a few blocks away.
Mr. Ruffins finished one set with a pop standard once sung by Bing Crosby, "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams." Halfway through, in casual New Orleans style, he handed the microphone to an audience member, who belted the song — with a line about castles tumbling — and then held on to the microphone long enough to add, "That's for all the people that lost their houses."
Later, Mr. Ruffins agreed. "Those tunes take a whole different meaning now," he said. "At one time in the club, we would just be singing them. Now, I listen to the words."
It is the exhibition's stated ambition to reconfigure the history of sculpture since World War II (and its constant return to the example of Duchamp) that is more problematic. Leaving aside questions about what does not appear at the Wexner—the polemical exclusion of Pop and Minimalism, the limiting of the potentially far-reaching inquiry to only European and North American art—there remains the question of the historical model being implied here. Do we need more family-tree art histories, however ingeniously regrafted their branches, in which the ultimate referent of contemporary art is the work of a past master? A mental melding of Duchamp's erotic objects and his handcrafted readymade duplicates would indeed seem to license the exciting range of part-body, part-commodity creations gathered here. Yet Molesworth's emphasis on his patrimony risks implying that the condition for these objects' invention and importance rests with previous art, rather than with the way they work through the dilemmas of a half century in which people, places, and resources have been used as parts rather than valued as wholes—the dilemmas of a commercialized world where desire is routed through objects in processes that are anything but organic.
Laudable indeed is the selection of Steven Parrino (1958-2005) and Jutta Koether (b. 1958). Steven died on New Year’s Day 2005 in a motorcycle accident in Brooklyn, and seeing his work at the Whitney should bring a few tears. The power in both Steven’s and Jutta’s paintings is in the search for the absolute dead ends of creative practice, not so much to explore them further (they are, after all, dead ends) but for the visceral experience of slamming into them head on. Jutta’s way cool, and dangerously unpredictable in her art. She was the resident critic for everything that was so essential out of the whole Cologne scene, and the art she made for her husband Tom Verlaine’s record albums is equally mesmeric as the music by this formidable leader of New York’s legendary band Television.
WARHOL LICENSING MANIA
In a recent study of licensing income, Forbes magazine reported that the estate of Andy Warhol raked in $16 million in 2005, making the ‘60s art superstar the magazine’s number four "top-earning dead person," right behind Elvis Presley ($45 million), Charles M. Schultz ($35 million) and John Lennon ($22 million), and beating out Dr. Seuss ($10 million), as well as Warhol subjects Marlon Brando ($9 million) and Marilyn Monroe ($8 million). But the real news in the 2005 list is the arrival of Warhol, a new development (the other lucrative dead people were already solidly at the top of a similar 2004 Forbes round-up). So, what accounts for Andy’s sudden rise?
A Warhol licensing bonanza, that’s what. The Andy Warhol Foundation agreement with the Beanstock Group -- a marketing corporation that has masterminded licenses for the Mary Kate and Ashley Olson clothing empire, among others -- started to pay off big last year. Already in 2003, the group won the Licensing Industry Merchandiser’s Association’s "Best Corporate Brand License of the Year" award for its Andy Warhol licensing program, and now one can see why. Current or future Warhol product news includes:
* The new "Warhol Factory X Levi's collection," a collection of men’s and women’s jeans, tops, sweaters and jackets, embellished with dollar sign, Marilyn Monroe, Mao and other imagery ($190-$250 for jeans; $80-$300 for tops) -- set to debut in spring 2006 in the U.S. and Canada.
* A number of gift-shop-type products from the New York-based company Loop, including paper weights ($16 each): bags -- in tote, messenger, DJ, hobo and satchel styles -- featuring flowers, Campbell’s soup designs and more ($26.40-$55); and Elvis and Chairman Mao-themed sleep masks ($11).
* European designer Joao Tovar’s "All Is Andy Warhol" line, on sale across Europe (to see images of some of the clothes featured on an Italian TV show, click here). Tovar’s fashion house, Cultura, is also pushing a CD called Andy Warhol by Cultura, with 25 tracks from the likes of Air, Faultline, Massive Attack, Moby and Unkle.
* Wallets stamped with the Velvet Underground banana, as well as bags using early Warhol ice cream and butterfly motifs, all branded with Warhol’s signature, from Paul Frank Industries, currently available at stores in the U.S. and Europe.
* London designer Philip Treacy’s 2004 line of "Warhol Hats," assorted varieties of beanies, ball caps and fedoras, made from material that features images of famous celebrities as well as Warhol’s late-career camouflage are still available at www.philiptreacy.co.uk, along with a line of bags, including a Campbell’s soup can-shaped clutch.
* Stationary and other items from San Francisco’s Chronicle Books, including an "Andy Warhol Men" silver foil address book, with a cover featuring a silk-screened image of a male bottom ($12.95), the "Pop Box" kit offering "exact reproductions of fascinating ephemera from the Factory years and beyond" ($24.95) and the "Warhol Idea Book," a sketch pad replete with quotes and illustrations ($18.95).
* A 2004 deal with Corbis makes the company exclusive licensor of digital Warhol artwork. The Seattle-based company offers some 500 Warhol images on its website for use by publishers and advertisers -- for a minimum of about $10,000 a pop, according to a company rep.
* Finally -- not a Beanstock licensee, but nevertheless doing its part to build Warholmania -- there’s Factory Girl, the George Hickenlooper-directed movie, currently in post-production, about the relationship between Sienna Miller’s Edie Sedgewick and Guy Pearce’s Andy. The film is such a hot property that it recently prompted a lawsuit by Sony against the Weinstein Company , claiming that it had been cheated out of distribution rights.
Duchamp is invariably referred to as an "anti-artist" and an "iconoclast." This is entirely false. Duchamp was a great art adviser to collectors. He wasn't against art at all; he was against the hypocritical aura surrounding it. More importantly, Duchamp may be the first modern artist to take God's prohibition against "hewn" objects to heart. Fountain is not hewn or made in any traditional sense. In effect, it is an unbegotten work, a kind of virgin birth, a cosmic coitus of imagination and intellect. Like a megalithic stone, Fountain is merely placed on view, pointed at as the locus of something intrinsic to art and as art itself. Duchamp's work relies on a leap of faith: that new thought structures can be formed based on things already in the world. Fountain is the aesthetic equivalent of the Word made Flesh: It is an incarnation of the invisible essence of art, an object in which the distance between image and prototype is narrowed to a scintillating sliver. Just as Christians perceive Christ as the invisible made visible, Jesus said "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," so Fountain essentially says, "He that hath seen me hath also seen the idea of me."
Duchamp adamantly asserted that he wanted to "de-deify" the artist. The readymades provide a way around inflexible either-or aesthetic propositions. They represent a Copernican shift in art. Fountain is what's called an "acheropoietoi," an image not shaped by the hands of an artist. Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical state. It is a manifestation of the Kantian sublime: A work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger. Its presence is grace.
dylan thomas under milk wood bbc more bbc text
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ubu index of artists stream audio and video
A c. 1916 water tower was saved from demolition yesterday after the city council of Venice, Fla., voted 5-1 against allowing the tower's owner, a local homeowners association, to tear it down.
hokum : an anthology of african-american humor
In a rare display of unanimity that cuts across partisan and geographic lines, lawmakers in virtually every statehouse across the country are advancing bills and constitutional amendments to limit use of the government's power of eminent domain to seize private property for economic development purposes.
The measures are in direct response to the United States Supreme Court's 5-to-4 decision last June in a landmark property rights case from Connecticut, upholding the authority of the City of New London to condemn homes in an aging neighborhood to make way for a private development of offices, condominiums and a hotel. It was a decision that one justice, who had written for the majority, later all but apologized for.
If all American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn, all American surf culture comes from Gidget, the ostensible diary of Kathy Kohner, a teensy, gutsy teenage girl who crashed the all-male scene at Malibu Beach north of L.A. in 1957 and earned, from Moondoggie and others, the nickname Gidget, which meant "Girl Midget." Her father, the German immigrant screenwriter Frederick Kohner, fascinated by the beach-shack counterculture, interviewed his perky daughter at length, eavesdropped with permission on her phone calls, fictionalized her adventures, and batted out this influential bestseller. He nailed a tiny subculture's new form of speech ("If you want to know what goes on in Loveville ... Dig Number One: being gone on a boy is more important than having a boy gone on you.") and made it a pop-culture staple. Newly reissued with the real Gidget's picture on the cover (as on the original hardback), the book is very slim (appropriately enough) and historically beguiling. You'll like her--you'll really like her! --Tim Appelothat first sentence contains double overstatements but you can see where he is going with it. gidget was a significant pop culture reference point. The real world moondoggie turns out to be west coast abstractionist bill jensen. (who is not moondog. whom some of us may remember as a ubiquitous viking garbed busker in midtown manhattan in the 1970's.)
It took a dozen years and two hundred and seventy-five million dollars to renovate the villa and surround it with a series of modernist buildings, including an entry pavilion, an amphitheatre, a parking garage, a café, an auditorium, an education center, and a shop. The project’s architects are Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, of Boston, rigorous modernists who have a love of classicism and believe that an architect best respects history not by imitating it but by teasing its spirit into new forms. Machado and Silvetti are about as far as you can get from Norman Neuerburg, who designed the original villa, and it seemed an odd match: there is nothing overtly charming about Machado and Silvetti’s work, while Neuerburg’s design was a vast, sprawling exercise in cuteness.
The campus that Machado and Silvetti have created is a bracing collage of old and new, and the villa has been nearly magically transformed. The task was surely made easier by the fact that the French furniture and Old Master paintings are gone from the villa, and its new contents have a genuine connection to ancient Rome. (In fact, some items in the collection may belong to Rome; the Getty has been accused of acquiring a significant number of looted artifacts.) But it takes more than hauling away some gilded frames to make a ponderous building into a gracious one. Instead of slavishly replicating Roman architecture (although various touches, such as new floors of bronze, mosaic, and marble, reveal a high level of scholarship), Machado and Silvetti have acknowledged the past without imitating it. They have boldly reorganized the villa, creating more logical routes through it and adding fifty-eight windows and three skylights, to bring natural light into the galleries. One of the best things in the villa now is a new main stair, of bronze, glass, and hand-carved Spanish stone; a meticulous modernist composition, it is broad, sumptuous, and serene, and a crisp counterpoint to the classical-looking environment around it. The effect is playful and knowing: in Italy, contemporary alterations to ancient Roman structures are often made in such a bluntly modern style, to make clear which elements are authentically old. Here, of course, the “original” details date from 1974.
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In recent years architects around the world have stopped using straight lines. If this trend continues at its current rate, a child drawing a house 10 years from now will not sketch a square building with a straight floor and a shingled roof, but rather one more reminiscent of a soap bubble.
The development of computer software programs used for architectural planning and for improving building technologies has produced a new architectural language - a language that creates buildings with amorphous forms known in the professional jargon as skins.
House Republicans plan to issue a blistering report on Wednesday that says the Bush administration delayed the evacuation of thousands of New Orleans residents by failing to act quickly on early reports that the levees had broken during Hurricane Katrina.
A draft of the report, to be issued by an 11-member, all-Republican committee, says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached, even though the president and other top administration officials earlier said that they had learned of the breach the next day.
That delay was significant, the report says, rejecting the defense given by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security that the time it took to recognize the breach did not significantly affect the response.
"If the levees breached and flooded a large portion of the city, then the flooded city would have to be completely evacuated," the draft report says. "Any delay in confirming the breaches would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city." It adds that the White House itself discounted damage reports that later proved true.
It's about the shoes, says Professor Ed Galea, in New York this week from the University of Greenwich to interview people who made it out of the twin towers on 9-11. All those women's high-heels that people saw littering the stairwells were but a colorful detail in most retellings of the day. For Galea, however, the shoes scream danger—and a need for new thinking about how to protect people in high-rises.
Galea and a band of other behavioral psychologists are here, as they will be for 36 weeks in the next year, attempting to interview 2,000 survivors from World Trade Center 1 and 2 to learn the details of their trips to safety (when they started to evacuate and why, whether they traveled in groups, how large the crowds were on the stairs, and so on) in hopes of influencing building codes to make high rises safer places to work, live, and—in an emergency—leave.
A veteran of disaster studies, Galea tells the Voice that the interviews so far appear to contradict many prevailing assumptions about how people evacuate buildings—the assumptions underlying current regulations governing how those buildings are built. For example, engineers around the world think most people start to evacuate in an emergency about two minutes after they learn of the incident. In the towers, however, folks in some cases lingered at their desks or the windows for an hour. Simply put, if true, that changes everything, from the volume of people the stairwells must accept to how long the fireproofing has to last.
the dialectic poetry of paul lawrence dunbar
bob not bob
from here not here
live music ~ vault radio
Bill Graham and his concert promotion company, Bill Graham Presents, produced more than 35,000 concerts all over the world. His first venue, the legendary Fillmore Auditorium, was home to many of rock's greatest performers - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Prince - and the list goes on and on.
Graham taped thousands of live performances and stored the tapes in the basement of the BGP headquarters.
These tapes and the concerts they captured lay dormant until the Bill Graham archive was acquired by Wolfgang's Vault (Bill Graham's given first name was Wolfgang) in 2003.
Vault Radio is now playing selected tracks from these concerts in an FM-quality, 128K digital radio stream. Songs will be added to and removed from the radio show on a regular basis. We will be broadcasting unaltered live performance music from many of the greatest bands of the last 40 years. The music you hear on Vault Radio has not been sweetened or polished. You'll be listening to what the band played that night - nothing more, nothing less.
streaming for free now w/ plans to sell downloads later this year.
rat rod report
1968 convertible corvette
White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.
But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have found.
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.
On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin is available online for free
FREE THE PEOPLE!
pinks
Bulldozers may start demolishing flood-damaged houses in New Orleans as soon as this month, but the city won't be razing as many as it planned to in December.This is a most promising development.
Preservationists are taking a closer look at a list of red-tagged buildings in New Orleans that the city says are in immediate danger of collapse.
Last month, the city's historic landmarks commission asked the National Trust's New Orleans Field Office and the Preservation Resource Center to inspect the 1,957 houses on a list that was made public last month after a lawsuit settlement. Most of the damaged houses are located in the Ninth Ward.
In the last three weeks, volunteers—architectural historians and other qualified inspectors—have identified about 100 that they say should not be demolished. The city's list of "red-rated" buildings was 5,500, and the recently published list was the "worst of the worst," says Walter Gallas, director of the New Orleans Field Office.
"We looked at properties that were in National Register and local historic districts that were in this initial list," Gallas says. "We started from this list of 5,500, but that number has been whittled down."
The Trust plans to act as a consultant with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the Section 106 review process, which is required before a federal agency can raze a National Register-listed historic resource.
"When requests for demolition come down, the Trust and Preservation Resource Center will be consulted," Gallas says. "It's just one part of the work we're doing."
To settle a lawsuit, the city agreed on Jan. 17 to notify owners of houses it wants to demolish in 30 days—in a letter, in an ad in the Times-Picayune, and on the newspaper's Web site. Homeowners will also be able to challenge the city's assessment. The lawsuit was filed over 120 Ninth Ward houses that were obstructing sidewalks and roads.
The city last month began notifying homeowners of impending demolitions, so according to the agreement, it can demolish those structures this month.
being jane jacobs via blowhard
more on JJ via robert silvey
frozen smoke
Brookings Findings
Days Since Katrina Made Landfall: 156
Now over five months since Katrina made landfall, New Orleans is home to over 130,000 people, including a much larger than expected population of college students. But, the city lacks enough essential services to support all of these returning residents, and the area continues to hemorrhage workers. What key trends were available this month for the states suggest little progress in both Louisiana and Mississippi.
[...]
The slow pace of recovery on fundamentals strongly suggests that the city and state will be unable to restore essential services on their own, and require direct federal assistance to do so. Meanwhile, the well being of the nearly 750,000 households that remain displaced by Katrina is essentially not known. With New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mississippi still facing massive economic and infrastructural challenges, it is likely that many of these households will need federal assistance for many months to come.
Why wireless Internet in Louisiana and New Orleans? Why is it so important for the citizens around the state?
Bayoubuzz asked the Chief Technology Officer, Greg Meffert to explain the needs of New Orleans and why it is so important to the State of Louisiana. Currently, the City of New Orleans is backing legislation that is on the Governor’s call to allow cities build or deploy wireless Internet systems for its citizens.
As we discovered during the very last hurricane season, there was a complete and total communications breakdown in areas throughout Louisiana. Each parish would be allowed to opt-in as to whether it wants to make wireless Internet available to its citizens.
sunny david aka roy hall
In the summer of 1954 Elvis Presley came to Roy Hall's club looking for work. Roy recalled; "I fired him after just that one night. He weren't no damn good." Towards the end of that same year another young man came to the club looking for work. He was Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy kept him on for a few weeks. Roy hired Jerry for $15 a night. They did a lot of duets together. It was also in 1954 that Roy Hall and a black musician named Dave Williams took a trip to the Everglades that resulted in one of the classic rock 'n' roll songs;
Twenty-one drums and an ol' bass horn
Somebody beatin' on a ding-dong
Come on over baby, whole lotta shakin'goin' on
Come on over baby, baby, you can't go wrong
There ain't no fakin', whole lotta shakin'goin' on
Well I said shake baby shake
I said shake baby shake
I said shake it baby shake it
I said shake baby shake
Come on over Whole lot of shakin goin' on
Ahhhhh Lets Go !!!
Piano Solo Guitar Solo
Verse
Weary old faiths make art while hot young sects make only trouble. Insincerity, or at least familiarity, seems to be a precondition of great religious art—the wheezing and worldly Renaissance Papacy produced the Sistine ceiling, while the young Apostolic Church left only a few scratched graffiti in the catacombs In America, certainly, very little art has attached itself directly to our own dazzling variety of sects and cults, perhaps because true belief is too busy with eternity to worry about the décor. The great exception is the Shakers who managed, throughout the hundred or so years of their flourishing, to make objects as magically austere that they continue to astonish our eyes and our sense of form long after the last Shakers stopped shaking. Everything that they touched is breathtaking in its beauty and simplicity. It is not a negative simplicity, either a simplicity of gewgaws eliminated and ornament excised, which, like that of distressed object found in a barn, appeals by accident to modern eyes trained already in the joys of minimalism. No, their objects show knowing, creative, shaping simplicity, and to look at a single Shaker box is to see as attenuated asymmetry, a slender, bendin eccentricity, which truly anticipates and rivals the bending organic sleekness of Brancusi’s “Bird in Flight” or the algorithmic logic of Bauhaus spoons and forks. Shaker objects don’t look simple; they look specifically Shaker.
[...]
It is here, ironically, in the need to make things to sell to other people, that the first stirrings of a distinct style begin. This is not to say that the objects were made insincerely, or that Shakerism in design was a scam. The built-in cupboards and chairs and ladders constructed only for other Shakers, in Shaker communities, are made in the same spirit as the things for sale. The point is that no line was drawn the other way around, either: what was made for sale looked like what was made for sacred. The urge to make consumer goods is, after all, one of the keenest spiritual disciplines that an ascetic can face: it forces spirit to take form. An ascetic drinking tea from a cup decides not to care what kind of cup he’s drinking from; an ascetic forced to make a cup has to ask what kind of cup he ought to drink from. By the mid-nineteenth century, “Shaker” had become a brand name.
The checks Bultman writes are allocated only to those who work, which these days in New Orleans can mean performing at a club in front of a handful of Federal Emergency Management Agency workers.
On many nights, money from the door is minimal or nonexistent. Bultman hopes her $100 subsidy is enough to dissuade someone from taking a gig in another city. If instruments and artifacts from the city's musical heritage were washed away, then New Orleans' soul -- the musicians who define it -- must stay.
"As the time wore on," Bultman says, "more and more musicians who were dumped all over the country wanted to come back. We soon realized that this is really about giving people instruments and giving people hope, and that's when we started paying the gig fees."
Two months ago, Bultman, a writer/historian and the co-founder of the New Orleans Musicians' Clinic, was urging displaced musicians to return to the city. She started the clinic with her husband in 1998 with the assistance of Dr. Jack B. McConnell, the developer of Tylenol tablets whose son, Page, played keyboards for the band Phish. With a mix of pride and a dedication to preserving a music culture that she says "percolates out of the ground," Bultman hoped all New Orleans' evacuees would soon be returning.
'NEW ORLEANS IS NOT A HEALTHY PLACE'
Reality, however, soon sunk in, and now she is not so sure. "The goal was to get everyone we could get back to New Orleans," she says. "Now that we're back, we've moved away from that. We've moved away from the fantasy that everything would go back to the way it was. New Orleans is just not a healthy place for everyone to come to."
After four years of public debates, political infighting, posturing and stalled momentum in the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan, the next five weeks promise to be among the most critical since the towers fell.
Gov. George E. Pataki set the stage for a March 14 showdown at ground zero shortly before Christmas when he gave the developer Larry A. Silverstein 90 days to work out his longstanding differences with the Port Authority over the rebuilding process.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg upped the ante recently in language certain to incite the developer, when he called on him to set aside his financial interests and "do the right thing": cede two proposed buildings and a major portion of the site to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey so that rebuilding can go more quickly.
[...]
"It's long overdue, but very welcome," Mr. Yaro said. "Ending up with a see-through Freedom Tower and the rest of the site vacant, while the developer gets a half billion in his pocket and the public is stuck with billions in obligations, doesn't sound like a particularly attractive outcome."
shipping container news
remember those black countertops in science lab classes? i thought it might make a good alternative to $45 sf honed black granite or dark slate or black dupont corian. turns out its made for home applications already and is marketed as durcon a molded epoxy resin.
But New Orleans' poor homeowners will lose even more if they rashly invest in fixing up homes that will later be deemed uninsurable or are in neighborhoods so sparsely populated they can't get police, water or electricity service. If these residents hold out only a few months more, they can make better decisions about what to do.
Local and federal government, on the other hand, must move fast to make sure the city is inhabitable for low-income citizens. The federal government urgently needs to craft a measure like the one proposed by Rep. Richard H. Baker, R-La. Baker's proposal would allow homeowners to sell their ruined homes to a state development corporation and help them move to safer areas.
President Bush, in a speech from New Orleans' then-deserted Jackson Square, promised the nation that New Orleans would be rebuilt, but the White House has inexplicably withheld its support for Baker's proposal. Does the president intend for the federal government to finance the replacement of every destroyed house where it stood? If not, how will the rebuilding of New Orleans be accomplished?
New Orleans, meanwhile, needs to gather information. How many displaced people wish to come home? How many would live elsewhere if their old neighborhoods are unlivable or dangerously situated? How might they rebuild social networks? Gathering answers to these questions will jump-start the city's ability to offer utilities where needed and make crucial decisions about rebuilding plans.
Every day the line snakes down a spartan corridor on the eighth floor of City Hall here, as hundreds of people clutch a piece of paper inscribed with a fateful percentage that could force them to abandon their home.
The number is always over 50, and it means a house was so damaged in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina — more than half-ruined — that it faces demolition, unless the owner can come up with tens of thousands of dollars to raise it several feet above the ground and any future floodwaters.
But there is a way out, and that is why so many people stand in line every day, collectively transforming this half-ruined city. "What you need to do is talk to a building inspector and get that lowered below 50 percent," a city worker calls out to the crowd. And at the end of the line, in a large open room down the hall, that is exactly what happens, nearly 90 percent of the time, New Orleans officials say.
By agreeing so often to these appeals — more than 6,000 over the last few months — city officials are in essence allowing random redevelopment to occur throughout the city, undermining a plan by Mayor C. Ray Nagin's rebuilding commission to hold off on building permits in damaged areas for several months until more careful planning can take place. That plan, greeted by widespread opposition, including from the mayor himself, is now essentially dead.
House by house, in devastated neighborhoods across the city, homeowners are bringing back their new-minted building permits and rebuilding New Orleans. As many as 500 such permits are issued every day, said Greg Meffert, the city official in charge of the rebuilding process.
And there is no particular rhyme or reason to who gets a permit, or consideration of whether their neighborhoods can really support its previous residents. One city building inspector, Devra Goldstein, called the proceedings on the eighth floor "really fly-by-night, chaotic, Wild West, get-what-you-want."
The floor, she said, represents "a plan by default."
It is also testament to the fierce desire of many displaced New Orleanians to re-establish themselves, no matter the odds.
hey joe!
Mr. Liddy's complaint about police tactics, while hardly novel from a big-city protester, stands out because of his job: He is a New York City police officer. The rallies he attended were organized in the summer of 2004 by his union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, to protest the pace of contract talks with the city.
Now the officers, through their union, are suing the city, charging that the police procedures at their demonstrations — many of them routinely used at war protests, antipoverty marches and mass bike rides — were so heavy-handed and intimidating that their First Amendment rights were violated.
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was."
Milan Kundera, The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting.
This quote opens the second chapter of Robert Bevan's timely and original book The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. As Bevan says, the destruction of symbolic buildings and the physical fabric of cities and civilisations is not merely collateral damage, but a deliberate intention by the attacker, to "dominate, divide, terrorise, and eliminate" the memory, history and identity of the opposing side. Cultural cleansing is inextricably linked to ethnic cleansing, genocide and holocausts.
Arranged thematically more than chronologically, the book shows the political forces at work that led to targeted destruction beyond military requirements, from the Roman erasure of Carthage in 146 BC, the elimination of the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and their cities, to the "murdering" of aristocrats' houses during the French Revolution. But it is the 20th century leading into the 21st that is examined with forensic insight. From Guernica to Dresden, China's continuing "Sinification" of Tibet, Cambodia and the Yugoslav war, few countries escape the culpability of physical and cultural genocide.
They've been heralded as the future of building and the solution to housing shortages, yet prefabs have failed to take off. Elaine Knutt asks whether they still have a future
The Prefabulous London exhibition running at New London Architecture is based on an ABC of prefab and modular construction. Considering that prefab has been on the architectural agenda for the best part of a decade, most architects with an interest in housing could probably recite this alphabet unaided: A is for affordable, B is for bricklayers (or lack thereof), C is for container, D is for demountable, E is for engineered, F is for factory….
But there is another prefab alphabet, one the exhibition organisers might not be so keen on: C is for Challenge Fund, the Housing Corporation's funding programme that was undersubcribed after not enough prefab projects came forward; M is for Piercy Connor's Microflat, never built because land costs in central London put the product out of price range for young professionals; and P is for Peabody Trust, a prefab pioneer that found the promised cost savings never materialised.
Some Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses
December 8 - March 26, 2006
Medtronic Gallery / Walker Arts Center
Today’s prefab movement has captured the spirit and imagination of a new generation of architects and home buyers, who together have championed a variety of modern modular dwellings that challenge preconceptions about “prefab” homes as cheap, cookie-cutter structures of last resort. This exhibition presents a variety of approaches to prefab—from houses owners can build from a kit of parts, such as Rocio Romero’s LVL House, to those that arrive fully assembled like the diminutive one-room version of weeHouse by St. Paul-based Alchemy Architects. Among the featured projects are the glimmering sculptural metallic Turbulence House by Steven Holl; Black Barn, a pitched-roof, modern adaptation of a Viking longhouse designed and produced by Pinc House of Sweden; and the playful system of Lazor FlatPak by Lazor Office of Minneapolis. Whether Michelle Kaufmann’s Sunset Breezehouse, which adopts a variety of ecological approaches to living and building, or the precision and craft of Marmol Radziner’s Desert House or the customizable configurations of Resolution: 4 Architecture, such houses better parallel the lifestyles of their owners, who desire more flexible living spaces and want to speed the pace of the building process without sacrificing the quality of materials or construction. For more and more people, prefab meets the conditions that make the dream of owning a modern home a reality.
la concha project / vegas
the c word and 9/11
[Republican] Christie Whitman, when she led the Environmental Protection Agency, made "misleading statements of safety" about the air quality near the World Trade Center in the days after the Sept. 11 attack and may have put the public in danger, a federal judge found yesterday.
The pointed criticism of Mrs. Whitman came in a ruling by the judge, Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan, in a 2004 class action lawsuit on behalf of residents and schoolchildren from downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn who say they were exposed to air contamination inside buildings near the trade center.
The suit, against Mrs. Whitman, other former and current E.P.A. officials and the agency itself, charges that they failed to warn people of dangerous materials in the air and then failed to carry out an adequate cleanup. The plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages and want the judge to order a thorough cleaning.
In her ruling, Judge Batts decided not to dismiss the case against Mrs. Whitman, who is being sued both as former administrator of the E.P.A. and as an individual.
As a legal matter, the ruling established that the suit's charges were well-documented and troubling enough to meet a legal standard to go forward. But Judge Batts also criticized Mrs. Whitman's performance in the days after the collapse of the towers unleashed, by the E.P.A.'s estimates, one million tons of dust on lower Manhattan and beyond.
"The allegations in this case of Whitman's reassuring and misleading statements of safety after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks are without question conscience-shocking,"Judge Batts said.
Calls to the Whitman Strategy Group, Mrs. Whitman's current business, and to Glenn S. Greene, the Justice Department lawyer who is representing her and the E.P.A. in the case, were not immediately returned. Mrs. Whitman, a former New Jersey governor, was administrator of the E.P.A. from 2001 to 2003.
Mrs. Whitman knew that the towers' destruction had released huge amounts of hazardous emissions, Judge Batts found. But as early as Sept. 13, Mrs. Whitman and the agency put out press releases saying that the air near ground zero was relatively safe and that there were "no significant levels" of asbestos dust in the air. They gave a green light for residents to return to their homes near the trade center site.
"By these actions," Judge Batts wrote, Mrs. Whitman "increased, and may have in fact created, the danger"to people living and working near the trade center. Judge Batts said that Mrs. Whitman was not entitled to immunity because she was a public official. Judge Batts allowed the suit to proceed on some counts against the E.P.A. She dismissed claims against Marianne L. Horinko, an assistant administrator of the E.P.A. at the time.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs were "very gratified that the court has recognized that the E.P.A. failed in its obligation to protect the residents of downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn," said Justin Blitz, a lead lawyer on the case.
In a statement yesterday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called the E.P.A.'s conduct "outrageous."
"New Yorkers were depending on the federal government to provide them with accurate information about the air they were breathing," she said. "I continue to believe that the White House owes New Yorkers an explanation."
About 2,000 tons of asbestos and 424,000 tons of concrete were used to build the towers, and when they came crashing down they released dust laden with toxins. After an expert panel failed last year to settle on a method for organizing an E.P.A. cleanup, the agency said it would proceed anyway with limited testing and cleaning of apartments in downtown Manhattan below Canal Street.
project 009 concept tree house - Conceptual research project in rural areas of England such as Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. In partnership with local planning authorities and property developers we aim to develop a modular tree house concept. This could, with a flexible planning arrangement, encourage a more organic approach to country living.via zoller
Architecturally, the design direction evolves from the underside, to the interior and then outwards concentrating on views and aspects above the tree horizon. The ‘belly’ of the tree house accommodates undulating kinetic baffles that utilise wind power to generate electricity. The plan form also meanders to the extent that modular sections can be prefabricated so that the overall size can vary from a single bedroom house up to a five bedroom model. The prefabricated design can be installed on site within two weeks, is extremely lightweight, uses many recycled products, is part self-sustainable and low on maintenance.
concrete canvas
viazars
craigs list starts charging $10 per rental listing.
who says whoa?
mit lab brush
via zars