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Two years after arriving at Nanterre, Jean [Baudrillard] was thrown into the most momentous event in recent French history—May ’68. Many people who take him simply for a dandy or a cynic forget the significance of these weeks of intense fever and utopia suddenly realized, which he experienced firsthand. It was all the more powerful since no one had thought it possible. For a while he became an activist, even a Maoist, but it did not take him long to realize that the same media that had snowballed the Paris events around the rest of the country, bringing General de Gaulle to his knees, had also brought about the sudden deflation that followed. Nevertheless, May ’68 remained for him one of the extraordinary occasions when signs assume a singular meaning—a radical event up there with the attacks on the World Trade Center. May ’68 and the twin towers were both far more formidable in their abrupt disappearance than they ever were in actuality. Indeed, after the latter event, Jean claimed that architecture had lost its ability to define space or acquire symbolic power. Architecture had nothing left to express beyond its own flat functionality, and he notoriously concluded that only those buildings that deserve to be destroyed are worth erecting.
cistern swimming pool (liners)
drinking images
East Village Meatshop Kurowycky's Shuttering
Sion Misrahi has revamped the Lower East Side, helping to transform old storefronts around Orchard Street into trendy businesses, but not everyone is impressed with the changes.
But the company owned by C. C. Myers, a 6-foot-5 contractor who favors peacock cowboy boots, fixed the mangled freeway so fast that some residents have recalibrated their respect for the California Department of Transportation, which hired him.
The state estimated that repairs to the 165-foot-long ramp between Interstates 80 and 580 would take 50 days and cost $5.2 million. For every day short of the June 26 deadline, it promised a $200,000 bonus, not to exceed a total of $5 million. The highest bid came in at $6.4 million. Mr. Myers’s company, C. C. Myers Inc., won with the lowest bid — $867,075 — and completed the project in 17 days, winning the full $5 million.