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christian marclay


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Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants


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glam vids on be-dazz


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Along the Gulf Coast, in the towns and fishing villages from New Orleans to Mobile, survivors of Hurricane Katrina are suffering from a constellation of similar health problems. They wake up wheezing, coughing and gasping for breath. Their eyes burn; their heads ache; they feel tired, lethargic. Nosebleeds are common, as are sinus infections and asthma attacks. Children and seniors are most severely afflicted, but no one is immune.

There's one other similarity: The people suffering from these illnesses live in trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Administration.

An estimated 275,000 Americans are living in more than 102,000 travel trailers and mobile homes that FEMA purchased after Hurricane Katrina. The price tag for the trailers was more than $2.6 billion, according to FEMA. Despite their cost of about $15,000 each, most are camperlike units, designed for overnight stays. Even if the best materials had been used in their construction - and that is a point of debate -they would not be appropriate for full-time living, according to experts on mobile homes. The interiors are fabricated from composite wood, particle board and other materials that emit formaldehyde, a common but toxic chemical.

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52 story koolhaas building slated for the 111 first street location in jersey city.


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14 years ago today was the botched ryder truck incident at the wtc

in memory of the pa employees who died on the job that day


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The Burj Dubai, slated to be the tallest building in the world when it’s done in 2009, is rising 160 stories or more (the final height is a secret) in the desert. It’s no anomaly. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seem to have whetted the global appetite to build taller and taller. Most of the new mega-skyscrapers are in Asia and the Middle East, but the engineers and architects are American. Why the boom? A combination of economic imperatives and powerful egos, both national and personal. Coming soon: the fulfillment of Frank Lloyd Wright’s dream of a mile-high building.

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machine for parking


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While New Orleans haggles over a master redevelopment plan, people in some neighborhoods like Broadmoor have been rebuilding on their own. They are forming partnerships with companies, universities and nonprofit organizations to help gut homes, assemble volunteers and find pumping equipment.

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One thing that Wall knew for certain when he took up the profession in the late 1970s is that he would not become a photojournalistic hunter. Educated as an art historian, he aspired instead to make photographs that could be constructed and experienced the way paintings are. “Most photographs cannot get looked at very often,” he told me. “They get exhausted. Great photographers have done it on the fly. It doesn’t happen that often. I just wasn’t interested in doing that. I didn’t want to spend my time running around trying to find an event that could be made into a picture that would be good.” He also disliked the way photographs were typically exhibited as small prints. “I don’t like the traditional 8 by 10,” he said. “They were done that size as displays for prints to run in books. It’s too shrunken, too compressed. When you’re making things to go on a wall, as I do, that seems too small.” The art that he liked best, from the full-length portraits of Velázquez and Manet to the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock and the floor pieces of Carl Andre, engaged the viewer on a lifelike human scale. They could be walked up to (or, in Andre’s case, onto) and moved away from. They held their own, on a wall or in a room. “If painting can be that scale and be effective, then a photograph ought to be effective at that size, too,” he concluded.

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In this hard-pressed city a proposal by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish four public housing complexes has touched a raw nerve. The demolition, which would affect more than 4,500 housing units, represents for some the plight of a poor, black underclass displaced by Hurricane Katrina and struggling to return. It also represents the problems that faced the city even before the hurricane: poverty, crime and racial divisions.

The bluntness of HUD’s solution reflects a degree of historical amnesia that this wounded city cannot afford. In its rush to demolish the apartment complexes — and replace them with the kind of generic mixed-income suburban community so favored by Washington bureaucrats — the agency demonstrates great insensitivity to both the displaced tenants and the urban fabric of this city.

Offering perhaps a last chance to bring some sanity to this process, a congressional subcommittee is scheduled to open hearings here on Feb. 22 about the future of the city’s affordable housing. It is an opportunity to rethink HUD’s questionable vision and reappraise the role that architecture plays in society.

The hearings should help open up a process that so far has seemed anything but democratic. HUD took control of the four complexes from the Housing Authority of New Orleans in 2002 because of accusations of financial mismanagement. In order to implement the demolition plan, both agencies must comply with a section of the National Historic Preservation Act that requires an appraisal of the historic significance of any building more than 50 years old. But they have largely ignored testimony from of a long list of preservationists, including the Louisiana Landmarks Society and a local representative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

In arguing to save the buildings, preservationists point to the human scale of the apartment complexes, whose pitched slate roofs, elegant brickwork and low-rise construction reflect a subtle understanding of the city’s historical context without slavishly mimicking it.

Tellingly, neither housing agency has closely examined alternatives to demolition, like renovating some buildings in the complexes and replacing others. Although the Housing Authority of New Orleans says that modernizing existing developments would cost more than building new housing, it has yet to release cost breakdowns or the source of the figures. John Fernandez, an architecture professor at M.I.T. who examined all four of the complexes, has suggested that the extent of the storm’s damage has been overstated.

The housing agencies’ tabula rasa planning mentality recalls the worst aspects of the postwar Modernist agenda, which substituted a suburban model of homogeneity for an urban one of diversity. The proposal for “traditional-style” pastel houses, set in neat little rows on uniform lots, is a model of conformity that attacks the idea of the city as a place where competing values coexist.

This is reinforced by the plan’s tendency to isolate the new housing from the rest of the city. Often arranged along dead-end cul-de-sacs, the proposed developments lack the mix of big and small buildings, residential apartments and retail shops that could weave them into the surrounding urban fabric.

The point is not to return people to the same housing conditions that existed before Hurricane Katrina, but to distinguish between failures of social policy and design policy. Architects can’t determine the economic mix of residents in public housing developments nor provide education and health services. Their job is to give physical form to social and cultural values.

In this city that should begin with a fair appraisal of existing housing. With its low scale, narrow footprint and high-quality construction, for example, the 1940s Lafitte development, one of the four complexes slated for demolition, cannot be compared to Desire, a generic, shoddily constructed housing block, built more than a decade later. Some have suggested carving new roads through existing developments to anchor them more firmly into the surrounding neighborhoods.

Solutions like this might preclude the violent bulldozing of neighborhoods in a city so short of housing. A willingness to make case by case historical distinctions would result in a more historically layered urban composition, one that could, eventually, include contemporary architectural ideas as well.

For that to happen, however, HUD needs to listen to the preservationists who have taken the time to examine the value of the city’s public housing stock. It might also consider tapping into a higher level of creative intelligence. Architects like Enrique Norten and Thom Mayne, for instance, are working on major projects for commercial developers in the city’s business district. Enlisting a similar level of imaginative talent to rethink the city’s public housing could help alleviate trenchant social divisions here.

If some feel nostalgia for places like Lafitte, it is partly because it embodies a time when America still seemed capable of a more hopeful vision, one in which architecture, planning and social policy collaborated to create a more decent society.


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darren almond
meantime 2000 steel sea container, aluminum polycarbonate, computerized electronic control system and components 114 x 480 x 96 inches mathew marks


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weird silver house


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What do you like better, narratology or ludology?

Excerpt from Espen Aarseth's "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation" in the 2004 MIT publication First Person edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan...

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The Global Village Shelter (GVS for short) is pretty basic, but at the same time pretty ingenious. Designed by Daniel Ferrara and Mia Ferrara Pelosi, a father-and-daughter team that runs a design studio in Morris, the GVS is made by Weyerhaeuser, the paper and building products company. Its laminated corrugated cardboard is waterproof, fire-resistant, biodegradable and can withstand most climates for 18 months, Ferrara Pelosi claims.

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The ravaged neighborhoods of New Orleans make a grim backdrop for imagining the future of American cities. But despite its criminally slow pace, the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s. And architecture and urban planning have become critical tools in shaping that new order.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development's plan to demolish four of the city's biggest low-income housing developments at a time when the city still cannot shelter the majority of its residents. The plan, which is being challenged in federal court by local housing advocates, would replace more than 5,000 units of public housing with a range of privately owned mixed-income developments.

Billed as a strategy for relieving the entrenched poverty of the city's urban slums, it is based on familiar arguments about the alienating effects of large-scale postwar inner-city housing.

But this argument seems strangely disingenuous in New Orleans. Built at the height of the New Deal, the city's public housing projects have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.

So it's not surprising that many of its residents suspect a sinister agenda is at work here. Locked out of the planning process, they fear the planned demolitions are part of a broad effort to prevent displaced poor people from returning to New Orleans.

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The point at issue: Federal law (the Stafford Act) normally requires a state match--from 10 to 25 percent--of the federal money used in infrastructure repair.

But, as the story points out, after 9/11, after Hurricane Andrew, after at least 25 other disasters over the last two decades, the Feds have waived the matching requirement. Now, with local government in New Orleans still straining for revenue (the State has a surplus), the Feds are refusing to waive the match. Result: vital infrastructure repair can't get started, because the city doesn't have the revenue to match the federal grant. Worse, the city's own laws require the municipality to have the cash on hand before the project is even begun, so the match can't be found later.

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mixed up

aak aak eek eek tookie tookie


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tiny house / think about it. wont you?


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NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 15 — After nearly a decade in the city of their dreams, Kasandra Larsen and her fiancé, Dylan Langlois, climbed into a rented moving truck on Marais Street last Sunday, pointed it toward New Hampshire, and said goodbye.

Not because of some great betrayal — they had, after all, come back after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina — but a series of escalating indignities: the attempted carjacking of a pregnant friend; the announced move to Nashville by Ms. Larsen’s employer; the human feces deposited on their roof by, they suspect, the contractors next door; the two burglaries in the space of a week; and, not least, the overnight wait for the police to respond.

A year ago, Ms. Larsen, 36, and Mr. Langlois, 37, were hopeful New Orleanians eager to rebuild and improve the city they adored. But now they have joined hundreds of the city’s best and brightest who, as if finally acknowledging a lover’s destructive impulses, have made the wrenching decision to leave at a time when the population is supposed to be rebounding.

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The film (nostalgia) (1971) by photographer and filmmaker Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) is a powerful document of cultural memory that articulates and demonstrates vital issues of memory, such as the use of autobiographical film, to explicate identity formation and the intricate relationship of photography and film to absence, memory and meaning. To begin, however, I will discuss the historical associations of nostalgia in order to differentiate it from its siblings homesickness and melancholy.


“Originally defined in the seventeenth century in terms of a set of physical
symptoms associated with acute homesickness”—nostos (home), algos (pain nostalgia’s contemporary association is as an emotional disorder, acknowledges
John Frow (1997:79-80). Rubenstein describes nostalgia as “an absence that
continues to occupy a palpable emotional space” and argues that “the felt ab-
sence of a person or place assumes form and occupies imaginative space as a
presence that may come to possess an individual” (Rubenstein 2001:5). Perhaps
it is unsurprising that nostalgia is historically associated with the “open wound”
of Sigmund Freud’s melancholia, the neurosis of failed mourning.


The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection,
cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all
activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in
self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of pun-
ishment. (Freud 1984 [1917]:252)


Rubenstein’s description qualifies the “painful awareness” of nostalgia as mel-
ancholic while simultaneously describing nostalgia as a response to “universal
inevitability of separation and loss” and “the existential condition of adulthood”
(Rubenstein 2001:4-5). As opposed to the spatial or geographical separation of homesickness, nostalgia according to Rubenstein reflects a temporal dilemma.


One can never truly return to original home of childhood, since it exists mostly as a
place in the imagination. Although the meaning of nostalgia itself has changed over
time, essentially it has come to signify not simply the loss of one’s childhood home but the loss of childhood itself. (Rubenstein 2001:4-5).

[....]

frampton spaghetti

Frampton’s interest is in creation (of photographs, indi- vidual identity, social meaning) and death (of representation, memory, self). In accordance with Frampton’s approach to photography as a process rather than a predatory act is the artist’s fascination with the natural, and at times social, birth and death of things. This is most obvious in the fourth and tenth images, which depict different objects in the process of deterioration. The narratives corresponding to these images are vital to understanding Frampton’s curiosity about decay.

The fourth image is the only surviving photograph of a series made of a cabinetmaker’s shop window over the course of two years (ironically, Frampton destroyed the others). At the time of exposure/development, the six photographs disappoint him; the voice-over explains, “each time, I found some reason to feel dissatisfied. The negative was too flat, or too harsh; or the framing was too tight” (Frampton 1972:106). When comparing the prints, a natural progression of de- cay is evident: “I was astonished! In the midst of my concern for the flaws in my method, the window itself had changed, from season to season, far more than my photographs had! I had thought my subject changeless, and my own sensibility pliable. But I was wrong about that” (Frampton 1972:106). The documentation of decay’s progression otherwise unnoticed by the daily human eye marks the beginning of Frampton’s fascination.

The image of rotting spaghetti provides an experiment in decay, the result, according to the voice-over, of “a painter friend [who] asked me to make a pho- tographic document of spaghetti, an image that he wanted to incorporate into a work of his own” (Frampton 1972:109). Jenkins notes that Rosenquist uses Frampton’s photograph “Spaghetti and Grass, 1965, where the strands from Frampton’s image form the upper half of the lithograph” (Jenkins 1984:21). Frampton documents the spaghetti’s demise by photographing it every day. [T]his was the eighteenth such photograph. The spaghetti has dried without rotting. The sauce is a kind of pink varnish on the yellow strings. The entirety is covered in attractive mature colonies of mold in three colors: black, green and white. I continued the series until no further change appeared to be taking place: about two months al- together. The spaghetti was never entirely consumed, but the mold eventually disap- peared. (Frampton 1972:109)

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Q. I want my Victorian fainting couch to look like Sigmund Freud’s. Where can I find upholstery fabric in Persian kilim patterns?

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The real bogeyman turns out not be private ownership but architects, especially those in thrall to Le Corbusier, the evil genius of Modernism. In this scenario, hapless working-class families were 'thrust' up in the air by 'arrogant' architects and planners who built 'dehumanising' tower blocks out of 'ugly, brutal' concrete. Surely poor building and lack of amenities are the main issue here, otherwise why do residents of the Barbican (which features concrete, 30-storey buildings and much-castigated walkways), say, or the flashy new residential towers which have sprung up recently all over the place – Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Canary Wharf – feel no need to burn cars, spray obscene graffiti or defecate in the lifts?

'The sameness drives me half mad,' she complains of the 'conforming' and 'anonymous' Wood estate, yet what could be more conforming than the Nash Terraces of Regent's Park, among the most sought after and priciest houses in the country? And in condemning flat living she barely acknowledges that one large area of the UK – Scotland – has a very long and harmonious history of housing all classes in flats.

This myopic view of architecture leads Hanley – in a curious mirror image of the messianic architects of the 1960s – to invest it with more power than it possesses on its own to transform society. She and her neighbours in East London wish to see their 1960s estate demolished and rebuilt as much as possible as small houses with gardens. I sincerely hope that she is right that this will transform their lives, but the troubled North Peckham estate, which underwent just such a reinvention a decade ago, suggests that it takes more than 'comforting lines of terraced houses and pleasing low-rise apartments' to make a happy council estate.

Hanley's mix of popular history, polemic and personal memoir bears a strong resemblance to another insider's working-class history – Michael Collins's The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, and it shares that book's strengths – passion, first-hand vividness – and its weaknesses – partiality, solipsism, historical myopia and most of all a failure to integrate the personal with the polemical. Rather like the council estates themselves, a good idea on paper that does not deliver in practice.

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A Louisiana plan called the Small Rental Property Program is designed to help owners of rental properties damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

It's part of The Road Home program, which was started last summer with $7.5 billion of federal money. Most of the Road Home funds are intended for Louisiana homeowners, but $800 million of the recovery money has been earmarked for landlords who own up to four rental properties.

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dirty linen

more rainy day blizzard music to watch


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the new this old house project is doing a green job on a 1926 austin tx craftsman bungalow

The architecture may be old at This Old House's new project in Austin, Texas, but the thinking is thoroughly modern. For the first time, the show is going totally "green"—using as many environmentally friendly building products and methods as possible—and creating a functional home for a contemporary blended family.

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state fair part 2


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texas state fair freak tent 1978

from old and water damaged negatives / photog jaschw
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toyota houses


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poglecto


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white-bread and embedded


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10 summer of haight photos (for mike - psyber exclusive)


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a306
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lambertville in on the delaware nj

starting at $200K
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untitled 1968
untitled, 1968

rip dan christensen

In the late 1960s, Christensen, 64, found that the realism of his classical art training was restrictive and began using spray guns to paint colorful stacked loops on canvas, winning him critical acclaim, The New York Times said. Besides the process of painting and experimentation, he was concerned about how color interacted

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liberty harbor north

When complete, the neighborhood of Liberty Harbor North will be the most thorough exemplification to date of the principles of the New Urbanism. Due to its high-density housing, multiple transit connections, and pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use streetscape, this development is likely to serve as a textbook model for healthy urban growth in the future.

Located just a half mile west of the Hudson River on the north bank of the Morris Canal, the 80-acre brownfield site in Jersey City boasts dramatic views of Lower Manhattan to the east and the Statue of Liberty to the south. A new light rail will provide two stops in the neighborhood; and the Grove Street PATH Train, with service to both Lower Manhattan and Midtown, is a five-minute walk away. A water taxi offers convenient access to Lower Manhattan, and New York Waterways has expressed interest in providing large-scale ferry service in the near future. The site is bordered by the Van Vorst neighborhood to the east and the Hamilton Park neighborhood to the north-- two historic neighborhoods worthy of emulation.

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“People are super busy, constantly on the go, and want a more subdued, uncomplicated home environment,” said Shawn Henderson, eBay’s design director. There has been a significant dip in sales of antiques on the Web site, he said, and although he could not quantify the change, he said there is so little interest that search terms like “Federal” and “Queen Anne” are not even on the radar. People want midcentury Modern, Art Deco or Craftsman style pieces from the 20th century.

In addition to fancying a newer, cleaner look, buyers do not want to risk making mistakes in buying antiques. “There are so many fake antiques on the market right now that people don’t want to bother with them,” said J. Randall Powers, an interior designer in Houston. Fakes have become more common in the last 10 years as improved technology has allowed for closer approximations. At most, he said, his clients might buy a single antique to serve as an accent or contrast to their mostly modern décor.

[...]

“Why would you pay a fortune for a lesser-quality, mediocre antique when you could get an über-antique reproduction for the same price?”

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PSF : A lot of your songs involved writing new lyrics for songs.

Tuli : It's a very old tradition. I used it a lot when I didn't have a band. The earliest singers I remember that did this was (Martin) Luther who took popular songs of the period and made church hymns out them. He said 'why should the devil have the best of tunes.' Then Joe Hill in the early part of the 1900's used church hymns and changed them into radical pop songs.

Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try and tell you what's wrong and what's right
But when asked about something to eat
They are sure, they are sure to repeat
'You'll get pie...
You'll get pie in the sky when you die (that's a lie)
Work and pray
Live on hay
You'll get pie in the sky when you die (it's a lie)'

So it's an old tradition. I call them para-songs.


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dead soda society

via vz
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vegas on the arabian gulf


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rip texas girl anna nicole


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Worker Shortages Post-Katrina Send Businesses out of Mississippi

Facing a housing shortage along the Gulf Coast, many companies are finding it difficult to find employees and as a result, are being forced to relocate. The NewsHour reports on how Mississippi businesses are grappling with the economic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

IMPORTING FOREIGN WORKERS



JEFFREY KAYE: Some Mississippi companies are using workers from much farther away than neighboring states. They're importing hundreds of employees from abroad.
Late last year, Signal International, an oil rig construction and repair company, brought in some 300 workers from India. Working as welders and pipe fitters, they've been issued temporary visas by the federal government under a program that allows companies that can't find U.S. employees to import foreign nationals.

The Indian workers live in housing inside the shipyard. They have to pay room and board. The company wouldn't let us shoot there, nor would they provide a representative for an on-camera interview. But off-camera, a Signal vice president told us the company also uses hundreds of workers, provided by labor contractors, including many guest workers from Mexico.

The Mexican workers -- about 300 of them -- live in a fenced-in compound at a site that's near the shipyard. When we started to interview the workers, the labor contractor that brought them in, Knight's Marine and Industrial Services, told us to leave. They refused to answer any questions.

The workers live in wooden sheds without windows, plumbing or insulation. They sleep in bunk beds -- six to a cabin -- where they store food. These pictures were taken and provided to us by workers who asked to remain anonymous, saying they feared retribution.

Putting foreign workers up in sheds may represent an extreme response to the labor shortage. But Mississippi businesses worry that the problem will not be resolved easily or soon. Bruce Nourse is vice president of MGM's Beau Rivage Casino in Biloxi.

BRUCE NOURSE, Beau Rivage Casino: We lost about 70,000 homes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. We have never built more than 2,500 homes in one year on the Gulf Coast. So just by virtue of that fact, it'll take us years to recoup what we had prior to the storm.

JEFFREY KAYE: The rebuilding brings with it a catch-22: As government and insurance money flows in, the demand for workers will be even more urgent.

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spinal tap


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the fall


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paris hilton


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BIG BOYS Austin TX punk, 'Funk Off' / 'Baby, Let's Play God'


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Butthole Surfers - Who Was In My Room Last Night? (224 hits)


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On Monday, the Harvard University Art Museums released a long-anticipated scientific study, performed with the cooperation of Alex Matter, of the chemical properties of three of the paintings, finding that some paints and pigments used in the works were not patented and probably not available until long after Pollock died in 1956. Alex Matter and Dr. Landau, who has conducted extensive research into the connections between Herbert Matter and Pollock, have questioned some of the findings, and Mr. Matter stressed in a statement that he believes “the authentication of works of art is still more art than science.”

The team at Harvard responded the way that scientists generally do: by saying that there is no arguing with science. Drawing an analogy to what he said were Bush administration efforts to suppress NASA information about global warming because it was politically unpalatable, Narayan Khandekar, a conservation scientist at Harvard, said in an interview that he and others who conducted the study were “absolutely sure” of their results and that quibbles about what they found struck him as disingenuous.

“I think it’s very much dismissing information because it’s inconvenient for their arguments,” he said, adding that such an approach to scholarly debate is “a little like Stephen Colbert’s concept of truthiness, where you’re almost there but you don’t have the whole thing.”

Dr. Landau said she did not reject science reflexively over her own experience, but added that she simply cannot reconcile the study’s findings with the other information she has collected, like a handwriting study that confirms the notes on the package were in Herbert Matter’s hands and evidence that the paintings had been corrected and retouched in a method that Pollock employed.

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Residents of several neighborhoods in the New Orleans area that were hardest hit by flooding after Hurricane Katrina can sue the Army Corps of Engineers over their claims that a government-built navigation channel was largely to blame, a federal judge ruled yesterday.

Successful lawsuits against the corps could result in billions of dollars in damage payments.

Since the flood, those who lived in the devastated neighborhoods near the east side of New Orleans — including the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish — have contended that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet caused much of their damage by intensifying the surge from the storm. The damage, they say, was foreseeable.

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sunday baroque 7 am


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Factory Girl is Edie for Dummies

Miller, meanwhile, works very hard at her Edie. She does the voice and the laugh and the style to a T, though she never nails the ineffable, effervescent vitality. Who could? On the one hand, Edie is a walking cliché: the poor little rich girl who burned bright then burned out. On the other, shes as enigmatic as Warhol, a white-light/white-heat lightning bolt from the zeitgeist, showering the scene with giddy radiance. You need but see her in Vinyl, her Factory film debut, holding down a corner of its deep-space S&M tableau doing nothing but flicking a cigarette and bopping her head, to get her enchantment. Chief among Hickenlooper's follies is his restaging of Vinyl; I'm glad his heavy hand laid off Kitchen, one of my favorite Warhol two-reelers, in which Edie gives a charmed, hilarious performance punctuated by nonstop sneezing, the signal she's forgotten a line.

Hickenlooper makes up for it with his mutilation of Beauty #2, the richest of Warhol's cine-interrogations and the apex of Edie's underground Superstardom. Plunked on a bed with a chunk of stud named Gino, Edie submits to the offscreen questions of Chuck Wein (a clueless Jimmy Fallon), an old friend of Edie's whose crucial and controversial role in the Factory ecosystem is here glossed over. Factory Girl literalizes the rape scenario implicit in Beauty #2, escalating into the vulgar (and wildly exaggerated) spectacle of Wein forcing Gino on the distressed starlet.


wasnt edie ciao! manhattan for dummies?


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photographic portfolio of an unknown modernist highschool




dig the crazy work on the wall in the art room.


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Fillmore 1960s Sunday Hippie Chrch Photo 4x6


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no i dont watch barkitecture. i have a cat.


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pronounced : sau-na


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c6746
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nyc highrise ceiling leak


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rip liberal texan-american molly ivins


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The Ecstasy of Influence

A plagiarism

Posted on Wednesday, January 31, 2007. Originally from February 2007. By Jonathan Lethem.


All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .

John Donne

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There’s a lot of water in the air. It rises from the surface of the oceans to a height of almost 100 kilometres. You feel it in high humidity, but there’s almost as much invisible moisture in the air above the Sahara or the Nullarbor as there is in the steamy tropics. The water that pools beneath an air-conditioned car, or in the tray under an old fridge, demonstrates the principle: cool the air and you get water. And no matter how much water we might take from the air, we’d never run out. Because the oceans would immediately replace it.

Trouble is, refrigerating air is a very costly business. Except when you do it Max’s way, with the Whisson windmill. Until his inventions are protected by international patents, I’m not going to give details. Max isn’t interested in profits – he just wants to save the world – but the technology remains “commercial in confidence” to protect his small band of investors and to encourage others.

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One of the three Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the Puget Sound area is on the market, a perfect time to wander through it and wonder why its ideas are being neglected in this century's thirst for reasonably priced, modestly scaled homes.

Although the asking price of just under $2 million is a giant step out of the middle-class leagues, this house wasn't conceived as a baronial estate. Original owners Ray and Mimi Brandes wrote to Wright in 1951, asking him to design a small house for a "simple unaffected servant-less life." Jack Cullen, Ray Brandes' stepson and the present owner, says they envisioned it as a showcase for their contracting business.

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