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if your thinking of moving to: laurel canyon


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Jenny Holzer's latest show, a survey of sensitive US government documents silk-screened onto linen canvases, offers a wrenching snapshot of the discursive girders and casualties (both textual and corporeal) of state violence. With rare exception, these texts have been rendered anonymous through bureaucratic redactions: An entire 1990 "Memo for the Secretary of Defense" by Colin Powell has been scribbled out, save the signature, while a series of fingerprints have been blotted into a sort of abstract graffiti art. The show tends to circumvent cynicism even as it sanctions an ironic position—perhaps an effect of the frequently shocking content. "I personally have killed a child," reads a line in the middle of a 2004 statement from a US soldier in Iraq. Contrasted with the rhetorical labyrinths assembled by administrators in other pieces, the blunt simplicity of this declaration heightens its dramatic effect, offering an illustration of Holzer's curatorial talent. However necessary, the field of citation is dangerous political ground, and despite Robert Storr's intelligent attempts to obviate criticism in an accompanying essay, it's worth examining the ethics of turning declassified public documents into unique aesthetic objects. One might question the value, or at least the efficacy, of "political art" once it's been funneled away into private collections.

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In the late '30s, Malaparte acquired property on Capri, intending to build a house. The writer redesigned every detail of his planned villa after disputes with the architect, Adalberto Libera, ended in an impasse. With the contractor Adolfo Amitrano and Amitrano's two sons, Malaparte built the place himself.

In The Skin, Malaparte relates that when German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel visited him on Capri, the Desert Fox asked if the writer had designed the house. "No," Malaparte replied. "I created the scenery." Malaparte had likely rehearsed this response to a yearned-for query for years in his bathroom mirror; it was too good a line to throw away, so he simply invented a visit from Rommel that never occurred.

Casa Malaparte bears a glancing resemblance to certain naval vessels used in the American Civil War: a long, slightly out-sloping rectangle, slanted on the landward end, where a trapezoidal stairway widens as it rises from the ground, ending level with a flat roof, where a C-shaped brise-soleil is the only interruption of the sea view.

The building sits on a plateau, flanked by wind-rustled boas of pine boughs and branches of holm oak overhanging the cliffsides of Capo Massullo. The site is the least hospitable outcrop of tufa on Capri, in spitting distance of Tiberius's grotto where, centuries ago, prepubescent "little fishes" nibbled at the emperor's genitals.

Malaparte referred to this domicile as casa come me, "come me" being a favored appellation for things he greatly liked. Another example doubles as a caution against unskeptical readings of Malaparte's fiction: Febo, a dog he rescued on Lipari, inspired a tender prose poem, "cane come me." In The Skin, Malaparte tells how, after years of tender devotion, Febo disappeared. The writer, frantic, searched everywhere on the island for the dog. He finally learned that Febo had been snatched by thieves who sold animals to a local vivisectionist. Malaparte raced to the laboratory, only to find his half-eviscerated pet in the wrenching throes of its last minutes.

The scene breaks any reader's heart. It broke mine, until I chanced upon a letter Malaparte's brother wrote, noting Febo's old age.

* * *

You know the house, from Godard's adaptation of Moravia's novel Contempt. In the film, its owner is the producer Jeremy Prokosch, played to Visigoth perfection by Jack Palance, who tyrannizes director Fritz Lang (playing himself) and cuckolds screenwriter Paul (Michel Piccoli) by seducing Camille (Brigitte Bardot) with Paul's spineless acquiescence. They've come to Capri to finish Lang's version of the Odyssey.

Godard implied no parallels between Malaparte and Prokosch. Prokosch is, as Malaparte wasn't, a dictator in his island hideaway, a barbarian who echoes Goebbels with a contemporary twist: "When I hear the word culture, I take out my checkbook."

Malaparte's casa come me owes nothing to Fascist monumentalism and little to architectural modernism. It is, like the Viennese house Wittgenstein built for his sister, a unique, incomparable architectural anomaly. It was far from perfectly engineered, however. The drainage system wasn't adequate to leach the Mediterranean salinity out of the roof and stucco walls, which were drenched constantly by the Caprian rainfall and occasionally by massive waves. Before its restoration, Casa Malaparte's walls had a consistency of 42 percent corrosive salt.
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bronze wire screen door mesh wdi 0.011 18x14 30"w 100' roll $275.00


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old timey



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lost delta found


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