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In the same way that skateboard style has influenced clothing and graphics, the new parks have begun to grab the attention of designers in other fields. Architect David Rockwell, designer of the Nobu restaurants in Manhattan and the set of the musical Hairspray, says skate parks, with their use of "the continuous ramp that leads you through a series of adventures," were an inspiration for a new playground he's working on. Joe Ragsdale, who teaches landscape architecture at California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo, says that every year his students come up with different ways to provide ideal flight paths for intrepid skaters. "Skate parks have come of age," he says.
Skateboarding has been around since the late 1950s, when California surfers began attaching wheels to short boards so that they could retrieve on dry land just a bit of the feeling they got from a wave. In no time it had evolved into an acrobatic art form that derived, like ballet, from the eternal human impulse to part the air with style. Skate parks, which first appeared in the 1970s, started out as places meant to draw skaters away from the respectable concrete of downtown. But those early parks tended to be melancholy stretches of concrete with a few bowls and half pipes--that's a semicircular ramp--thrown in. The merest parking lot was more fun. Over the next decade many of the parks closed, victims of underuse and high insurance costs.
Construction began in 1971, six years after Le Corbusier’s death, with private funds from the Le Corbusier Foundation (raised in part by the sale of some of his art collection). But the contractor went broke, and construction stopped with only half the building completed. For years it stood abandoned, its concrete base evoking a disused military bunker.
An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.
The galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha blobs, are aligned along three curvy filaments that formed about 2 billion years after the universe exploded into existence after the theoretical Big Bang. The filaments were recently seen using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea.
Start with a fascinating failure from Pollock’s wonder years, 1947-50. “Number 13, 1949,” in oil, enamel, and aluminum paint, a dead spot in a sequence of fiercely energized pictures, has been cited in defense of “the Matter Pollocks.” Like them, it has a blandly decorative effect—in contrast to the unresolved tumult that usually marks a less successful Pollock—but only because a boldly experimental motif proved not to work. After painting an amorphous ground of aluminum, white, red, and green, and before overlaying skeins of dripped white, Pollock executed an irregular network of brushed black diagonal bars. This use of geometric elements recalls earlier work in the show—strenuously forced mergers of regular forms with surreal figuration and expressive gesture—and looks ahead to the artist’s last major drip painting, “Blue Poles” (1952), whose eponymous forms snarl like overloaded lightning rods. In “Number 13,” the bars upstage the drips and downstage the underpainting. Analyzing the work is as instructive as an autopsy. You see the muscles and nerves of an amazing style in repose, which is nothing like the soaring serenity that Pollock attained elsewhere. In his best work, which he produced almost incessantly from 1947 until, after long sobriety, he succumbed to drink again, late in 1950, Pollock mastered a quality reminiscent of van Gogh, who wrote to his brother of being “calm even in the catastrophe.”
midnight ramblers
Another great disciple of the Fred McDowell blues lineage has passed on, Jessie Mae Hemphill has died in Memphis at age 71 from complications of an infection that may have been related to an ulcer. Born in North Mississippi as granddaughter to Lomax fixture Sid Hemphill, Jessie Mae evolved the power of the fife-and-drum sound of the hills into self-stylized rhythmic qualities of electric guitar and had been flooring crowds since the 1960's up until a debilitating stroke in 1993. Besides her hypnotic, fevered approach to anything with strings (including at points a bottleneck style approach to a diddley bow, a long broom wire attached to an outside of a house wall played with metal or by hand), Hemphill also would add to the show with foot and leg operated tambourines, bells, etc. and generally shake up anything not bolted down in the room (attendees includes). Despite the fact that she was largely regarded as a major purveyor of the real blues (one famous tale recounts her all-woman trio taking over a BB King show while his band took a break, and blowing him away), she lived in relative obscurity to the mainstream, being increasingly discovered late in her life along similar lines as Junior Kimbrough and RL Burnside (both of whom she was close to, and have also passed in recent years). Tales filtered in of Jessie living somewhat in a state of squalor through her last decade, fueled with some bits of monetary support for rent and living by fans, and this week's news of her death after checking in to a hospital a week ago is more dismal considering the increasing amount of loss in true keepers of the flame. Some real audio clips to remember Jessie: "Streamlined Train", "Shake It Baby". And three of her CDs are available via Hightone/HMG.
a social history of objects + cold bud
new york (times) dolls
zero energy homes
the long tail
If there is any one moment of decisive change in American art, it seems the moment when Jackson Pollock, freshly released from the Westchester Division of New York Hospital, where he had been treated for acute alcoholism, "went for the first time abstract," as his older brother Sanford McCoy wrote.(5) "After years of trying to work along lines completely unsympathetic to his nature, he has finally dropped the Benton nonsense and is coming out with an honest creative art." Sanford wrote this in May 1940, two years after Pollock was hospitalized "in serious mental shape," and one year after he began Jungian psychoanalysis, still suffering "from isolation and extreme emotional deprivation in early childhood," as Joseph Henderson, his therapist, thought. It seems ironic that it was schizophrenia that liberated American art from provincial realism -- that the abstract turn was taken by an artist who suffered from "a pathological form of introversion."
It was Henderson who made the diagnosis of schizophrenia, noting Pollock’s "paralysis or withdrawal," alternating with "violent agitation" -- deep depression followed by drinking binges, as Sanford’s wife Arloie Conway observed -- and who, over a period of 18 months, received 69 "psychoanalytic drawings" and one gouache painting from Pollock. Interpreting the symbols in the first drawing, which depicts a bizarre crucifixion, Henderson stated: "The patient appears to have been in a state similar to the novice in a tribal initiation rite during which he is ritually dismembered at the outset of an ordeal whose goal is to change him from a boy to a man." Did Pollock ever reach the goal? It seems not, considering the fact that he died (1956, aged 44) driving under the influence, indicating that he remained an alcoholic until his death, apart (apparently) from the few years (1947-50) during which he made his "breakthough" all-over paintings. Nor does the fact that dismemberment became the method and theme, not to say substance, of his art -- a dismemberment of the traditional figure, and of the traditional idea of painting, that, I want to suggest, signals Pollock’s unending identity crisis, indeed, his perpetual process of disintegration. Like a seismograph, Pollock’s painting registers the shattering. Every tremor left a painterly trace, quixotically estheticized into tragic elegance.
NEW CANAAN -- Built of glass, steel and brick, Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House will soon add a new feature -- a welcome mat.
The house, which served as the famed architect's private residence for more than 50 years before he died last year, is nestled behind a stone wall on Ponus Ridge Road and has long been reserved only for the pages of modern architectural books and magazines.
Johnson bequeathed the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which plans to open the home along with its extensive modern art collection to the public next spring.
lsp closed
"cowboys are the only ones that play in tune anyway"21 min audio collage of hendrix stage banter - wfmu bwtb mp3
Since the interior space of an 8-by-40-foot box would have felt like a mine shaft, Humble and Egan cut it down to an 8-by-20-foot piece, then salvaged a 20-foot container from a previous project and joined them side-by-side, offset by six feet. This created a sleeping nook in one of the offset ends that's precisely filled by a double bed, and provided space at the other for a bathroom.
Interior walls are furred out with steel studs and spray-in foam insulation, and fir plywood screwed to the studs -- used plywood, salvaged from another building, with no pretense of prettying it up. Large swaths of the walls open out or slide away, becoming a floor-to-ceiling window on one side and a large sliding glass door on another. Fully opened up, the studio feels more like a pavilion than an enclosure, a minimalist shelter that falls somewhere between Thoreau's primitive cabin and Philip Johnson's pristine glass house. Closed up like a mechanical clam, it could be left alone for years without an owner's worrying about any of the usual threats to a weekend cabin. Fire, quake, wood rot, bugs, burglars -- it's as vulnerable as a boulder.
Aesthetically, this prototype will annoy, or possibly infuriate, more people than it fascinates. The contrast with its natural setting is stark, as jarring as a rusty chainsaw abandoned on a wilderness trail. But aesthetics aren't the point. As Humble puts it, "The idea is more important than the object. The underlying values that support and drive the object can change society."
essex between rivington and clinton
kerrville iso shippping container project staring k bighair from dallas. day 5
The 62-year-old Rolling Stone is a guest guitarist on My Soul is a Witness -- a collection of African-American spirituals released without fanfare last month.
The book and CD project is the brainchild of Richards' sister-in-law, concert vocalist Marsha Hansen.
About half the music was recorded at the guitarist's Connecticut home in 2001.
Richards plays on a half-dozen tracks, including I Want Jesus to Walk With Me and Rock in Jerusalem. Also performing on the album is former Beach Boy Blondie Chaplin and Bob Dylan drummer George Receli.
The CD may be hard to find. Augsburg Books, affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, initially printed only 2,500 copies. A second printing is on the way.
Hansen, who is married to a Lutheran minister, says she didn't have to twist her in-law's arm to get his assistance.
"His understanding of music is very deep -- not just rock music," she said. "He's particularly intrigued by African-American music, roots music."
tumbleweed house via j zoller
pinc houses 1, 2, 3
and some more from boing boing / thanks jimb!
vinalhaven maine in nyt again (2nd time in as many weeks)
please dont read or watch slideshow
The Weekly Sunday night services quickly drew a large congregation, who burned a buck for admission. Fervent worshipers also turned out for Purple Geezus and Workdogs shows on other nights of the week. Their reputations grew, and though Purple Geezus eventually fizzled, Osterhout remained a Workdogs admirer. "I really like their whole concept of the rhythm section being the front people, having the traditional 'front people' being expendable, that the Workdogs are a rhythm section for hire, approaching it as a conceptual art piece, rather than a typical band with 'Let's get a record out, go on tour and get famous, those kind of things, they don't have any of that. They continue to play and stay at the same conceptual level -- it's amazing to me that those guys still do it with such consistency."
as much of an american flag enthusiast as i am, i also withhold the right to use it for artistic purpose. the above post describes the admittance ritual of burning a dollar bill to get into the church of the little green man services. i recall one occasion that small fabric american flags were substituted. i believe that was during the bush 1 administrations first attempt at getting a constitutional amendment which would have made such practice illegal.
read more on COTLGM
read more about our freedom of speech and flags from here
related gifs