cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

voice


[link] [1 comment]

dark terry southern story (mp3) from here


[link] [1 comment]

Baudrillard’s rejection of art was all the more unexpected, and appeared all the more outrageous to those who believed he had crossed over. And yet he didn’t seem to notice the contradiction. The episode of the “simulationist school” (and of the “anti-simulationist” controversy) may have had something to do with it. In 1987 Baudrillard didn’t yet know much about the American art world and didn’t quite realize what was happening around his name. At best, he told me later, he sensed that “there was something fishy there” [Je me suis méfié] with a sound peasant-like distrust of sleek city talkers. So he flatly refused to play into the artists’ hands. He might as well have acceded their demand, the way he subsequently accepted the gallerists’ offer to exhibit his photographs because it would eventually have amounted to the same. What could anything one does ever be wrong coming “after the orgy”? If art ceased to matter as art, then what prevented anyone from joining in? Actually that he, who admittedly had no artistic claim or pedigree, would be invited to exhibit his work, amply proved his point: there was nothing special anymore about art. Groucho Marx once said that he would never join a club that accepted him as a member. Baudrillard did worse: he joined a group whose reasons to exist he publicly denied.

“Pataphysician at twenty – situationist at thirty – utopian at forty – transversal at fifty – viral and metaleptic at sixty – the whole of my history,”9 is the way Baudrillard once epitomized his own itinerary. Pataphysics was founded by Alfred Jarry, creator of Ubu, the brat-king with a paunch. It is the science of imaginary solutions, and this is precisely what Baudrillard reinvented in the circumstance. A pataphysical solution to a problem that didn’t exist. Because he certainly had no problem with it. Others may have, but it was their problem and it wasn’t up to him to solve it. Attacking art and becoming an artist all at the same time was perfectly acceptable in his book. He hadn’t asked to show his photographs, merely obliged. As far as he knew, they may have been trying to bribe him publicly, some kind of “sting operation” by the art squad. But they always implicate you in one way or another, so at least it was all above board. It was part of the "conspiracy" of art. Baudrillard didn’t have to feel any qualms about it, could even enjoy the ride for what it was worth. Early on he learned from French anthropologist Marcel Mauss that “gifts” always come with a vengeance. He knew he would eventually have to reciprocate, squaring the circle. And he did: he wrote “The Conspiracy of Art.”

[link] [add a comment]

The world becomes real to such a degree of reality that is bearable only by the way of a perpetual denial of the type :"This is not a world" (echoing the famous "This is not a pipe" of Magritte, as a surrealist denial of the evidence - Duchamp could just as well have said This is not a fountain). This double impulse of the absolute, definitive evidence of the world and of the equally radical denial of this evidence dominates the whole trajectory of modern art, but not only : all our perceptions and imagination of the world are affected. And it is not a question of moral philosophy or nos-talgia, as one would say : The world is not what it ought to be - or :The world is no longer what it was. No : the world is quite such as it is. Once all transcendance has been expelled, things are merely what they are, and such as they are, they are unbearable. They become immediately and totally real, without shadow, without comment. A giant ready-made. The reality is insuperable, but at the same time it doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't exist because it can no longer be exchanged for anything else. "Does reality exist ? Are we in a real world ? Such obsessive questions, which are the pervasive leit-motiv of our culture, simply expresses the fact that the world, trapped in the claws of reality, is bearable mow" only under the sign, in the shadow of the principle of Evil, that is in the form, whatever it may be, of a basic and radical denial. This is our double bind : since the world can no longer be justified in another world, it must be invested as real and released from all illusions (included, of course, the illusion of art, which no longer has any reason for being, except that of reinforcing this reality, as in the ready-made object), and at the same time we must go further and further into the denial of this reality, through the very impact of this negative countertransfer.

[link] [add a comment]

Hundreds of pieces of mail destined for the former trade center still arrive every day at a post office facing ground zero -- the relics of the unfinished lives of Sept. 11 victims.

Telephone bills, insurance statements, wine club announcements, college alumni newsletters, even government checks populate the bundles of mail. Each bears the ZIP code once reserved exclusively for the twin towers: 10048.

''I guess sooner or later they'll realize the towers aren't back up,'' said letter carrier Seprina Jones-Sims, who handles the trade center mail. ''I don't know when.''

Some of the nation's most recognizable companies and organizations, from retailers to research hospitals, are among those sending the mail. Much of it seems to result from businesses not updating their bulk mailing lists, said U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman Pat McGovern.

The postal service declined to identify the senders and recipients of the letters according to policy. Several companies formerly housed in the towers also declined comment.

The trade center mail meets varied fates once it arrives at the Church Street station.

A handful of companies pay for a service that forces the post office to hold the mail until a messenger picks it up. The rest of the mail travels various routes. Some will be returned to the sender, some will be forwarded to the company's current address and some will be sent to a Brooklyn recycling firm to be destroyed.

That the Postal Service is even forwarding mail from a nonexistent address five years later is rare. ''Normally we'd only forward mail for a year, but we're making an exception here,'' McGovern said.

The trade center's mail used to travel from the Church Street post office and up through the towers. It would start on the ground tucked in the letter carrier's bag and continue up higher and higher -- to the 68th floor, the 89th floor, the 104th floor.

The morning's mail never made it through the flames and smoke on Sept. 11, 2001. It stayed put with the letter carriers, who silently observed the chaos that unfurled outside the post office.

Flying debris blew out most of its windows. After a three-year restoration, its doors officially reopened in August 2004.

Rafael Feliciano delivered mail to floors 78 through 100 of the south tower for three years. He watched the tower collapse on television from a bar several blocks away with a co-worker.

''He turned to me and said, 'You just lost your route,''' Feliciano recalled. When the dust cleared, he spent weeks identifying office workers who came to pick up their mail, searching for familiar faces to see if they had survived.

[link] [add a comment]

upperbucks / real watch : reigelsville pa 18077 3 br, 2 Bath
1,600 Sq. Ft. 0.25 Acre asking $229,000.00 / Single Family Property, Area: Riegelsville Boro, County: Bucks County, Approximately 0.25 acre(s), Age: 106 year(s) old, Waterview, Waterfront property, Three story, Basement, Dining room, Laundry room, Hardwood floors


[link] [add a comment]

my container house designs are included on the habitainer links page


[link] [add a comment]

drunk couple
[link] [7 comments]

DENVER - What do remote-control garage door openers have to do with national security? A secretive Air Force facility in Colorado Springs tested a radio frequency this past week that it would use to communicate with first responders in the event of a homeland security threat. But the frequency also controls an estimated 50 million garage door openers, and hundreds of residents in the area found that theirs had suddenly stopped working.

[link] [add a comment]

VIEWED in silhouette, the Lower East Side has for years had the shape of a saucer, with taller apartment buildings on the edges sloping down to a uniform line of four- and five-story tenements in the center.


That concave profile is quickly changing. New buildings, some over twice the height of the existing architecture, with multicolored checkerboard facades to boot, have driven neighbors to demand that the city change the area’s zoning to protect it.

And the city has responded. At a packed community board meeting last month, the Department of City Planning unveiled a plan that would basically allow taller buildings on wider streets but ban them on narrower ones. The plan’s details are expected to take months to hammer out.

Overlooked in the hubbub, perhaps, are smaller new structures like the Switch Building that are changing the neighborhood’s look, if not its skyline.

[link] [add a comment]