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hollywood locusts descend on jc westside
(taking up both sides of the block street parking and blocking drive ways for better part of december)
Mobile Minimalism - Flavio Galvagni of Lab Zero has a few projects that I think deserve mention here.
another justin discovery thanks dude!
Q & A with Anne Matthews, author of "If Walls Could Talk"
While working on her essay on how buildings sound, author Anne Matthews became intimately more aware of her own surroundings, of the differences in ambient noise, for example, associated with buildings in various settings. Matthews, the author of several books, teaches at Princeton University. Here she discusses the writing of "If Walls Could Talk" with Preservation's associate editor Eric Wills.
EW: Why do you think the movement to preserve sound has recently gained momentum?
AM: Because the world is getting infinitely noisier very fast. Alex van Oss is very eloquent on the subject in my story. We are literally not wired to handle the noise, and yet when we seek silence, tranquility, and natural sound, the social, cultural, and geographical barriers are higher than ever. When you want peace and quiet you really have to work for it these days. It's something that you value much more when you do find it. The preservation impulse takes over at that point. Something that's marvelous and vanishing inspires the desire to save it for the future.
The New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM) is sponsoring a design competition to enhance the City's ability to provisionally house residents after a major coastal storm. Read the invitation letter from OEM's Commissioner.
But the Ennis, as noted, is in bad shape. It's now owned by a private conservancy, the Ennis House Foundation, that has at least succeeded in making it stable. But far more remains to be done. Ten million dollars is the estimate.
The Ennis is, as far as I'm concerned, the poster child for a problem nobody seems to be interested in solving: How do we protect our great works of architecture?
How is it, for example, that a buyer will spend $135 million for a painting by Gustav Klimt, but nobody will foot the bill to save a masterpiece of architecture? Wright's best houses are certainly, in my view, greater total works of art than all but the most remarkable of individual paintings.
The problem, I suppose, is that a plutocrat can't hang a building on the wall to impress his or her friends. The United States needs to find a way, as so many European countries have, to find a permanent solution for our great architecture.
From its first placard, the exhibition pulled no punches. There, within corridors that were his own creation, came blunt questions of the man's achievement and legacy:
"Genius? Fraud? Artist? Who is Frank Gehry?"
Such was the introduction to a recent retrospective on Mr. Gehry's long career in architecture and design. The exhibition was held inside the architect's first Ohio building - the sculpture-for-living that is the University of Toledo's Center for the Visual Arts.
Adjoined to the Toledo Museum of Art, the center opened 15 years ago next month as a home to the university's art department and the museum's reference library. Outside the 51,000-square-foot building is an agglomeration of boxy shapes and zig-zagging angles clad in gray lead-coated copper plates.
Mr. Gehry has described the building's skin as a jazz excursion, complete with visual riffs and syncopated rhythms that lift the eye up, then down, then back around. One critic called it "a collision of the Merrimack and the Monitor on the museum's grounds."
The University of Toledo’s Center for the Visual Arts adjoining the art museum has been called by one critic ‘a collision of the Merrimack and the Monitor on the museum’s grounds.’
It's just such design creativity that lifted Mr. Gehry to the pedestal of the world's most well-known living "starchitect." Yet that iconoclasm has often generated controversy for his projects in Toledo and elsewhere.
rejuvination
hueckel china of ca
hardware store display signs
unicat
via jz
the gemmary
Close Radio 111 audio works recorded for KPFK by visual and performance artists between 1976 and 1979. Includes rarities and never-before heard cuts from mostly LA / CalArts-based artists such as John Baldessari, The Kipper Kids, Martha Rosler, Jack Goldstein, Ant Farm, Hermann Nitsch, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and many, many others. From the Evidence of Movement show at the Getty.
“Making art has never been a mystery to me,” Prince continues. “It’s never been something that’s very difficult.” The “umpires” of the art world could re-purpose that same statement as an indictment of Prince’s work. “I’m old enough to not worry about being judged,” Prince responds. “Most artists have made their decision about their work before it goes out of the studio. What am I going to say about something I did 30 years ago? There’s nothing to say.”
Gesner can be credited for a large part of the unique visual culture that comprises the Malibu landscape. His Wave House, built in 1957, inspired the Danish architect Jorn Utzon, who went on to design the Sydney Opera House. More recently, Getty Museum architect Richard Meier insisted the museum restore a Gesner house on property it had acquired years ago. "Meier said, 'Don't tear the house down. It's an example of his work, and a very good one.' I can't believe he did this, but he did," Gesner boasts. "They put about a million dollars into fixing it up so it could be a center for their trustees. I was amazed I had designed it, it looked so great."
art about art about...
and [no comments] about art
As one Philip Johnson house opens to the world, another may be headed for the trash heap.
The Historical Review Committee imposed a 90-day demolition delay on the Alice Ball house last Thursday, after dozens of letters in objection to the planned razing were submitted. The owner, architect Christina Ross, had filed for a demolition permit, following the Environmental Commission’s rejection of a proposed second house on the property. The earliest Ms. Ross may demolish the house is 90 days from the date of her application, November 1.
Under New Canaan’s demolition delay ordinance, a single objection to the razing of certain historical structures can halt demolition for 90 days. The ordinance’s intent is to allow more time to find a buyer willing to preserve an older structure, or at least salvage or document historical artifacts.
The Alice Ball House, designed by Mr. Johnson for a woman and built in 1953, was purchased by Ms. Ross for $1.5 million in 2005.
Ms. Ross had planned to convert the existing three-bedroom, three-bath home into a pool house with changing rooms and a play room; install a pool and build a six-bedroom house with a four-car garage at the rear of the property. Additions built on to the original 1,300 square-foot design would be removed, and plans call to extend the existing driveway to a proposed 7,200 square-foot home, following what was an old carriage road.
But due to wetlands on the property — the modern having been built on a filled wetland — the proposal required approval from the Environmental Commission. After five months of public hearings and deliberation, the commission unanimously denied the application in April, 2006.
Greetings all.
This is the long awaited Funky16Corners Radio Podcast Archive.
Here you will find titles, tracklists and download links for all the editions of the Funky16Corners Radio podcasts.
You will also find, with each podcast a link to the original post.
This page will be updated as each new podcast is added. I hope you dig it.
Peace
Larry
From Andy Warhol to Lonelygirl15, modern media culture thrives on the traffic in counterfeit selves. In this world the greatest artist will also be, almost axiomatically, the biggest fraud. And looking back over the past 50 years or so, it is hard to find anyone with a greater ability to synthesize authenticity — to give his serial hoaxes and impersonations the ring of revealed and esoteric truth — than Bob Dylan.
It’s not just that Robert Zimmerman, a Jewish teenager growing up in Eisenhower-era Minnesota, borrowed a name from a Welsh poet and the singing style of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl troubadour and bluffed his way into the New York folk scene. That was chutzpah. What followed was genius — the elaboration of an enigmatic, mercurial personality that seemed entirely of its moment and at the same time connected to a lost agrarian past. From the start, Mr. Dylan has been singularly adept at channeling and recombining various strands of the American musical and literary vernacular, but he has often seemed less like an interpreter of those traditions than like their incarnation.
Neil Diamond held onto the secret for decades, but he has finally revealed that President Kennedy's daughter was the inspiration for his smash hit "Sweet Caroline."
"I've never discussed it with anybody before _ intentionally," the 66-year-old singer-songwriter told The Associated Press on Monday during a break from recording. "I thought maybe I would tell it to Caroline when I met her someday."
He got his chance last week when he performed the song via satellite at Caroline Kennedy's 50th birthday party.
master plan working and on schedule:
In one of the clearest signs yet of Hurricane Katrina’s lasting demographic impact, the City Council is about to have a white majority for the first time in over two decades, pointing up again the storm’s displacement of thousands of residents, mostly black.
first snow snow monkey live cam japan
holy ghost people
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.via vz
implosion of morris lapidus hotel in bal harbour fla
Frank Sinatra and his ''Rat Pack'' -- Dean, Sammy, Joey, and Peter -- held court at its Carnival Supper Club. And there were the hundreds of thousands of tourists, who strolled through the Sheraton Bal Harbour hotel's majestic and mosaic lobby during its half-century existence. Sunday morning, with a staccato series of booms, it all became part of the past. The hotel, which opened to the public in 1956 as the Americana, came tumbling down.via vz
Hardoy (butterfly) chair resource
Nakashima Straight Backed Chair
via adman
insane 1959 folkways street gang kids do improv raps NM - Urban field recordings of the Junior Mint gang. Freestyling, rhyming and letting it all out over kiddie bongo drills. Listen to clips of Gang Fight and I Want Some Food.
The first pair of customers came 26 minutes early, and their arrival Monday morning drew smiles of relief from the staff at Encounter, the iconic LAX restaurant that had been closed for repairs for eight months.
"Before we could open up our doors, we were getting customers," said operations manager Kenneth Merritt. "It's good to be back in business."
That was the sentiment of Steven O'Bryant of Azusa and his 16-year-old son Kyle, the first two in the door. O'Bryant had planned to drive to San Diego for the day, but when he heard an early morning radio report that the intergalactic-styled restaurant would reopen for lunch at 11 a.m., he and Kyle headed for Los Angeles International Airport. O'Bryant, 47, had last eaten there when he was 10.
"I didn't recognize it until I came in here," he said, pointing out the blobby, multicolored decor that might have been inspired by a lava lamp. "These might even be the same tables."
Encounter is housed in the Theme Building, which was completed in 1961 and designated a historic-cultural monument by the Los Angeles City Council and the Cultural Heritage Commission in 1992. The restaurant is operated by Delaware North Cos. Travel Hospitality Services. The observation deck has been closed since 9/11 for security reasons, but is expected to reopen once the exterior renovation is complete, said Nancy Castles, a spokeswoman for the airport agency.
Featured in many movies and tourist snapshots, the kitschy landmark was closed in March after a 1,000-pound piece of stucco fell from one of its spider-like arches. No one was injured, but inspectors assessed the damage, and officials decided it was safer to close the building while crews retrofitted the structure.
In 2002, when the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York began to plan for a new building on the Bowery, east of its previous location, in SoHo, it decided to limit the search to younger architects who had not built anything in New York. “We thought we should be consistent with our mission of supporting new art,” Lisa Phillips, the director, told me. The search led the museum to SANAA, a twelve-year-old firm in Tokyo, whose principals, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, are known for buildings of almost diaphanous lightness. When the museum hired them, Sejima and Nishizawa had just one American commission, the Glass Pavilion, at the Toledo Museum of Art, an eye-catching structure of curving glass walls, which opened last year. Their best-known work includes a low-slung circular art gallery with no clear front or back, in Kanazawa, Japan, and a design school in Essen, Germany, that is a concrete cube a hundred feet high, punctuated, seemingly at random, with windows of assorted sizes.
SANAA’s refined style might seem odd on the Bowery, one of the grittiest streets in New York. The site, a former parking lot at the intersection with Prince Street, was framed by blocks of restaurant-supply stores, whose owners seemed to be the only property holders on the Lower East Side who showed no interest in selling out to condominium developers. But after two decades in SoHo the New Museum had seen both the upside and the downside of gentrification. Marcia Tucker established the museum in 1977—the day after she was fired from the Whitney for curating shows that it found too controversial—in order to focus on cutting-edge art. Yet as the museum grew larger it drifted from its radical beginnings, just as the Museum of Modern Art had done two generations before. The decision to move to the Bowery was perhaps a clever way of assuring its supporters that its agenda remains radical.
reference library case goods
Indeed, there are only two major differences in Bloomberg’s and Thor’s plans for the amusement district. First, Bloomberg wouldn’t permit hotel construction in the heart of the district or along the Boardwalk. And second, the city wants to rezone the amusement district as public parkland.
To do so, Bloomberg will still need to buy out Sitt — who paid more than $100 million for his land — and some smaller-time landowners, rezone the land, and then hand-pick a new developer.
Horace Bullard, a developer who owns land in the amusement district and who once harbored similarly grand visions for the area, said he didn’t think the administration would run into much opposition from local property owners.
“No one in his right mind will be fighting the city on this issue if he’s justly compensated for it,” said Bullard, one of the landowners who would, indeed, need to be compensated.
But not everyone shares Bullard’s rosy optimism.
Dennis Vourderis, whose family has operated the Wonder Wheel for 87 years and owned the Wheel, its popular kiddie park and the land under it for 24 years, doesn’t particularly want to cede his land.
“We hope that the city doesn’t force us to lose our land at an unfair price and against our wishes,” said Vourderis, frustrated that the city prefers an integrated theme park to a hodgepodge of honky-tonk, family-owned businesses.
FILMS BY TONY CONRAD THE FLICKER 1966, 30 minutes, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by The National Film Preservation Foundation. Mathematical and rhythmical orchestration of white and black frames. STRAIGHT AND NARROW 1970, 10 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by The National Film Preservation Foundation. STRAIGHT AND NARROW is a study in subjective color and visual rhythm. Although it is printed on black-and-white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory color effects. FILM FEEDBACK 1974, 15 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by The National Film Preservation Foundation. “Made with a film-feedback team which I directed at Antioch College. Negative image is shot from a small rear-projection screen, the film comes out of the camera continuously (in the dark room) and is immediately processed, dried, and projected on the screen by the team. What are the qualities of film that may be made visible through feedback?” –T.C. Total running time: ca. 60 minutes.
Upcoming Showings: Sunday Nov 18 6:00 PM
The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City
Which is more important to New York City's economy, the gleaming corporate office--or the grungy rock club that launches the best new bands? If you said "office," think again. In The Warhol Economy, Elizabeth Currid argues that creative industries like fashion, art, and music drive the economy of New York as much as--if not more than--finance, real estate, and law. And these creative industries are fueled by the social life that whirls around the clubs, galleries, music venues, and fashion shows where creative people meet, network, exchange ideas, pass judgments, and set the trends that shape popular culture.
The implications of Currid's argument are far-reaching, and not just for New York. Urban policymakers, she suggests, have not only seriously underestimated the importance of the cultural economy, but they have failed to recognize that it depends on a vibrant creative social scene. They haven't understood, in other words, the social, cultural, and economic mix that Currid calls the Warhol economy.
Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs from the Early 1900s
Early 20th century disasters like the Titanic and the Great Depression inspired homegrown music. Henry Sapoznik has put together a new CD box set called People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938, with an introduction by Tom Waits.
Good news everone! I contacted Herman Miller and got the right department this time. The problem with the Ames Chair seems to be quite common. The part is called a "Stockmount".that is the part that connects the back to the seat. They will fix the problem. The cost is $146 per pannel plus state tax. You do have to disassemble the chair yourself though (very Ikea). They have sent me instructions to do so. then ship the chair parts affected to their factory in Michigan. contact info Herman Miller for the home 800•646•4400 Mon-Fri,8am-5pm est linda_lutke@hermanmiller.com
I’m just going to do this as a list. I find that the lesser known companies have better prices than your Restoration Hardware or Rejuvenation, but there, I’ve mentioned them too. Some of these sites sell antique hardware as well as reproductions. If you’re on the lookout for historically correct doorknobs, switch plates, hinges or drawer pulls, these are the places to hit.
mobile homes images
"The words of Kenneth Goldsmith, described by Juliana Spahr as 'the world's leading conceptual poet', and by himself as 'the most boring writer that has ever lived'. His ideas are being brought to the screen by artist and director Simon Morris in a film to premiere at the British Library in London on Friday 26th October. Christian Bök, one of Canada's leading poets and the winner of the 2002 Griffin poetry prize, said: "Goldsmith is our James Joyce for the 21st century."
'sucking on words' introduces 8000 of those daily words - a flurry of excitement as the climates of conflict and admiration come together around Goldsmith's pioneering conceptual poetics. Shot on location in Manhattan in February this year, 'sucking on words' features interviews with the leading critics and poets Bruce Andrews, Barbara Cole, and Robert Fitterman.
Goldsmith says: "I'm more interested in knowing language better in the way Warhol was knowing image better by simply turning the camera on to it and letting it run."
And Simon Morris adds: "Goldsmith is turning the literary world on its head by encouraging plagiarism and suggesting writers throw away existing notions of intellectual property." As Goldsmith says: "We don't need the new sentence, the old sentence re-framed is good enough."
Conceptual writing is the poetics of the moment. It fuses avant-garde impulses of the twentieth century with technologies of the present. The material morphs between the web and the printed page. It draws attention to the materiality of the word and the conceptual nature of this type of literature - the writing is the idea and the idea is the writing.
two in the outhouse drinking
and other drinking images
LA LOT
NN
is that all there is?
the tube bar jersey city
these are the prank calls that influence Bart Simpson calls to Moe's
via jz
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued the architect Frank Gehry and a construction company, claiming that “design and construction failures” in the institute’s $300 million Stata Center resulted in pervasive leaks, cracks and drainage problems that have required costly repairs.via vz
The center, which features angular sections that appear to be falling on top of one another, opened to great acclaim in the spring of 2004. Mr. Gehry once said that it “looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate.”
Dear Mailing List Subscriber,
I have work in a couple of fun group shows opening in Brooklyn this week. Hope to see you at the receptions!
What: Dan Levenson Presents The All-Smoking Art Opening – Sponsored by Altria
When: ONE NIGHT ONLY -- 11:00pm – 12:30am, Thursday, November 8th, 2007 (Broadcast begins at 11:30)
Where: New General Catalog, 140 Franklin Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn (G train to Greenpoint)
This special event will feature more than 100 smoking intellectuals and artistic types perusing an exhibition of all-black artworks (I'm showing a Bootleg "Steven Parrino"). If you missed out on Paris in the 1920s, this is your big chance, and maybe your last chance, as the coming ice age of mediocrity, blandness and uniformity descends permanently on New York’s cultural landscape. Visitors are encouraged to wear dark-colored clothing and chic eyewear. Extra credit for carrying a book of poetry, philosophy or modernist literature. Super extra credit if this book is written in a language other than English. Super double extra credit if you and a friend can discuss this book in that language. The event will be broadcast live over the internet.
Free cigarettes will be available for smokers, provided courtesy of Altria Group. Non-smokers are grudgingly welcome, but stay out of our way.
http://www.cameandwent.com/ngc/episode4.html
"Shipping-container-architecture
A comprehensive repository of information, links, photos, and videos of shipping containers used as buildings or parts of buildings
100 architecture blogs
via meta filter (art)
Janos Starker Bach: 6 Cello Suites (Mono)
Rare originals of this recording have been going on Ebay for upwards of $1,500. The sound quality and performance are absolutely to-die-for.
Today, it is difficult to understand that despite the tremendous Bach renaissance that took place in the 19th century, many compositions by the Cantor of St. Thomas’ Church in Leipzig had been underrated. The Cello Suites, for example, have been regarded for almost 300 years as purely a set of tricky etudes that every virtuoso in the making simply must tackle. Janos Starker’s recording of the Suites from 1965 makes a lasting impression on the listener, and even record producers who are well used to recorded excellence have been highly impressed. Starker’s full-bodied sound and technical brilliance are complemented by his finely chiseled interpretation that lends immense expression to Bach’s thrilling harmony and verve to the strict rhythmic construction of the movements.
calder junk on ebay
In that sense, the artifice and the accounting that brought the IAC Headquarters into existence turned, in part, on the molecular configuration of glass. Not that this mattered to Gehry’s personal “creative process,” which exhibited its usual resourcefulness in recognizing aesthetic potential in the natural tendency of so unnatural a material as glass to deflect under pressure. But it does raise a number of questions. The first has to do with authorship. Who designed the IAC? At one level, the answer is simple: Frank Gehry. But maybe we should also say “Frank Gehry,” which is another name for the system behind the “star system”: long lists of extras and bit players, assistants to the assistant producer. To put it slightly differently, this may or may not be a “real” Gehry building. And oddly enough, this possibility makes the entire operation more revealing about what constitutes an authentic work of architecture in the first place, and about the world in which that work may or may not exist.
Presented with such a possibility, the task of criticism is not to reproduce the vernacular of movie advertisements and declare a particular building a “stunning achievement.” Nor is it to register disappointment, via the usual combination of scorn and condescension. Either response only offers more raw material to the culture industry. Instead, the task of criticism is to pose questions — to de-contextualize and to re-contextualize —to understand what is at stake in the situation at hand. So to ask whether (and in what sense) we are actually dealing with something that can be called a “work” of architecture here is to detach the object from the name (or “signature”) of the architect to see the social, economic, and aesthetic function of both more clearly.
Thus: Whether or not Gehry himself arrived at the insight to use cold forming at IAC, an entire team of professionals was necessary to pull it off, not a few of whom worked for the glass manufacturer Permasteelisa. Where is the line between architect / author and consultant / collaborator here? Unclear. Likewise for the building’s interiors, most of which were actually executed by STUDIOS Architecture. Though here, the demarcating line may be a little more visible. Generally, it can be drawn a few feet in from the facade at the perimeter cove light that lines the building on each floor and the accompanying layer of mechanical shades, each custom-cut (and many curved), that can be lowered to reduce or eliminate the sunlight. Regardless of what particular combination of architects and consultants actually designed this combination of details at the building’s perimeter, together with the fritted glazing they construct a layered depth that may be seen from the outside during the day and a phosphorescent glow at night. These visual properties are central to the building’s architectural claims.
Equally important, however, is that STUDIOS, headquartered in San Francisco and veterans of Silicon Valley, are experts in the reinvention of the office. From their early, jaunty-yet-relaxed campus for Silicon Graphics (now the Googleplex) in Mountain View, California, to the New York interiors of Bloomberg L.P. Headquarters, they have developed a systems approach that combines informality with efficiency. Though office culture was evidently not an overriding concern for Gehry, judging from the results it was most definitely of concern to his client. IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller presides over a conglomerate comprising over sixty Internet-related entities, each with its own identity and mission, gathered together here for the first time in one building. And so, inboard from the cove light we find a new-economy office landscape dedicated to intra-office social life (snack bars on every office floor, cafeteria above, etc.). The plans demonstrate the difficulty of squeezing this system of social systems — quasi-modular, loose, but still systematic — into Gehry’s undulating shell and core. STUDIOS accomplishes this with a certain finesse, though the two architectures grate against one another at their many points of contact.
Prince himself has led a double life at times, disseminating spurious interviews, fudging his biography, even exhibiting curtains of Budweiser cans under the name John Dogg. Other biographical snippets are revealed in the recent "Check Paintings," such as the 12-foot-wide My Life Story, which features the artist's own bank checks behind huge block letters spelling out gags, including "I collect rare photographs. I got one where Norman Rockwell is beating up a child." These works dovetail with Prince's collecting mania: He's a serious bibliophile, and he also acquires the signed, cancelled checks and other celebrity memorabilia found in his "Publicity" collages. In one, he juxtaposes a banal shot of Woodstock against a drumhead signed by the Velvet Underground (a band that wouldn't have been caught dead at any hippie lovefest); his witty wrongheadedness chimes a sweet minor chord amid our cultural cacophony.
But in the large "White Paintings," some of which mix bland line drawings with boxing photos in warmed-over Rauschenberg-like layers, or in his flabby de Kooning knockoffs—which feature beaver shots grafted onto the master's flourishes of flesh—it becomes evident that Prince is at his best when performing Pop-cult surgery rather than stitching together high-art Frankensteins. Or, looked at another way, Prince is only as good as his swipe file (those clippings of figurative poses, facial expressions, props, and vehicles that illustrators stockpile for inspiration). In his muscle-car sculptures, for instance, he zeroes in on the smoothly erupting hood scoops and sleekly indented curves, caressing them with body filler and minimalist gradations of color to achieve a tactile, high-octane sensuality. But despite the catalog's breathless assertion that he's making "outlaw art" because of his image "piracy," there aren't any startling transgressions here.
Still, if you want Prince to be a hood, fair enough. So was Fonzie.