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rock my religion


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5272
Mark Dagley’s 222 Bowery studio (1987)


A good artist does not need anything.

—Ad Reinhardt

When NYFA Current asked me to write a first-person account of the circumstances surrounding a not-so-recent exhibition of my paintings, a show that took place at Tony Shafrazi Gallery nearly a quarter of a century ago, I was surprised by their interest, but gladly jumped at the chance. I never hesitate to admit to any and all who care to listen that my 1987 New York City debut was considered a failure by local critics and collectors, not to mention the disappointed dealer. While preshow interest was high, in the end little work sold, and a well-regarded ARTFORUM writer snarkily dissed my efforts. Paradoxically, this perceived failure launched me on a fairly successful trajectory in the European art world: Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland—but that’s another story.

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Iggy Pop's French inspired jazz album, Preliminaires (Foreplay), will be in stores on June 2 via Astralworks. Along with originals, the album also includes takes on Les Feuilles Mortes (Autumn Leaves) in the original French and Antonio Carlos Jobim's How Insensitive.

In describing the album, Pop called it a "quieter album, with some jazz overtones, because at one point, I just got sick of listening to idiot thugs with guitars banging out crappy music and I've started listening to a lot of New Orleans-era, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton type of jazz."

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My last morning was like any other. I awakened with my mouth open, in the snow, with no shelter to speak of. Some of us called the empty lots behind the old matzo shop, at the corner of Norfolk and Rivington, the toxic waste dump. One never knew what or who might end up there, shiny needles, wine and other more intimate fluids were exchanged freely, we kept each other warm with song, spit and stories, of better, longer days and places where the sun filtered soft and lovely through fluttering leaves and left Indian paint patterns on our innocent faces.

Maybe there were fifty or so of us in the lot that night, none of our mothers when they walked us to kindergarten that first day and left us in the parking lot imagined their lovely child would ever end up in a place like this, even for one night. Everyone knows vacant lots are haunted by the men who once came home here where the walk was and hugged their pealing children tightly to their chests. It was almost an entire block, big enough for a baseball field. Some of us had fashioned temporary bivouac structures out of discards: cardboard boxes, found pieces of wood and orphaned plastic tarp.

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wooden surfboards are back! grain surfboards of maine

via justin at materialicious
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gas powered la-z-boy

via jbf
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These books and website on the blizzard of signs that direct our lives offers a guide to the quizzical, the hilarious, and the sophisticated science behind their creation.


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This is no victory, says Owen Hatherley in Militant Modernism. We are in the grip of Ikea modernism, he argues, which has as much to do with the muscular movement that advanced through Britain after the Second World War as New Labour has to do with Clement Attlee. Modernism, the preserve of the middle classes, is now considered "too good" or too difficult for the disordered masses. It has been supplanted by "sandal-wearing continental modernism, freeze-dried and smug", just another flavour in the aesthetic ice cream parlour of consumer choice, its artefacts annexed by the heritage industry.

In this sparky, polemical and ferociously learned book, Hatherley - an icon contributor - makes his case for a modernist reformation by eulogising some of its less-appreciated past glories. Modernism, far from being just another chapter in the history of architecture or the interior decorator's sourcebook, is nothing if it is not a comprehensive, utopian social programme. As such, it is a potentially useful "index of ideas" for progressives. As you might have guessed, Hatherley is writing from a position firmly on the left - he suggests that modernism provides a blueprint for a radical left-wing alternative to the existing world, a positive proposal for a political persuasion at the moment fixated on protest and rejection.

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More than 35 years after they recorded their first album (released only as an 8-track tape), The Flatlanders -- Texas singer-songwriters Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock -- are back together.


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Lawsuit Aims to Prevent Razing of New Orleans Historic District

In 2008, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed New Orleans’ Charity Hospital and the neighborhood surrounding it, the Mid-City Historic District, on its list of America’s most endangered historic places. Now, the Trust is taking its protective efforts a step further.

On May 1, the Trust filed a lawsuit against the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), claiming that their involvement in a plan to bulldoze part of the historic district to make way for two new hospitals is illegal and immoral. One of the facilities will be owned by the state and will serve as a Louisiana State University teaching hospital. It is being partly funded by FEMA. The other facility is to be built by the VA. The projects were jointly announced last November, with the enthusiastic support of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

The lawsuit, filed in a federal district court in Washington, D.C., holds that the governmental agencies violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to adequately analyze the impact of the medical complex on the Mid-City district, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The two projects would mean the loss of 165 homes within 15 square blocks, according to the Trust.

“Historic properties are within the scope of NEPA and must be considered in the environmental review process,” says Elizabeth S. Merritt, deputy general counsel for the Trust. “They avoided the requirements of the process by splitting the review into phases rather than evaluating the impact of the entire development.”

The Trust is not suing the state or LSU because they do not have a “legal responsibility to comply with NEPA,” according to Merritt. Only federal agencies are required to comply.

Spokesmen for FEMA and the VA declined to comment, citing a policy not to publicly speak about active litigation. According to Michael DiResto, a spokesman for the state of Louisiana, the state is confident that the two agencies are fully compliant with federal law. “This attempt to interrupt these critically needed projects is both untimely and without basis,” says DiResto.

While not widely known outside of New Orleans, the Mid-City district is rich in iconic New Orleans architectural styles, such as Creole cottages and shotgun houses. Since the neighborhood was identified as the probable location of the new hospitals, preservationists and community advocates have rallied against the plan and urged the state and the VA to consider alternative options.

The LSU facility would replace the university’s former teaching hospital, Charity Hospital (1939), designed by Weiss, Dreyfous and Seiferth. The Art Deco-style building suffered severe flood damage during Hurricane Katrina and never reopened. The proposed new facility is being designed by the local firm Blitch Knevel Architects and Seattle-based NBBJ. FEMA is providing partial funding for the $1.2 billion, 1.1-million-square-foot project as compensation for the loss of Charity Hospital.

The $925-million VA facility, already funded by Congress, will replace a VA hospital that also was damaged beyond repair by Katrina. The new, 1-million-square-foot facility is being designed by Studio NOVA—a team of architects from NBBJ’s Columbus, Ohio office and two New Orleans firms, Eskew+Dumez+Ripple and Rozas Ward Architects. Construction is scheduled to start in 2010.

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Ferrari Sells for a Record $12.4 Million


wango tango


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the trades


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Opening Reception: Thursday, May 28, 6-8pm

New York, NY, May 1, 2009 - David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce Slough, a group exhibition curated by gallery artist Steve DiBenedetto.

The impetus behind this exhibition is the flexibility of the word slough, which has various interpretations. Pronounced slew, slough can describe a bog-like, swampy, dark, primordial and somewhat mysterious realm. The alternate and less used, but maybe also appropriate interpretation, is a state of moral degradation or spiritual dejection that one cannot extract oneself from. Pronounced sluff, slough refers to that which has been cast aside or shed off, like a skin. It can also describe the manner in which material tends to accumulate at the edges of a performed task, such as the accumulation of dust on the rim of a fan, snow on the edge of a shovel, or trash in the breakdown lane of a highway.

Either way, these notions, in a very general sense, will be used as the stimulus to explore ideas about marginal territory, accumulation, holes and residue. Some works will have a more obvious connection to these conditions, (i.e., Larry Poons, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Tony Feher), while other works might be a little more unexpectedly related, (i.e., Jessica Craig Martin, Philip Taaffe, and Hanneline Rogeberg).

A certain dynamic at work will be the inclusion of things that may not even be apparent as art at first, coexisting with virtual masterpieces of traditional forms. The works, which represent a highly diverse range of mediums, from established 20th century masters to cutting edge contemporary artists, will associate with various states of deterioration and repair, forging unusual and unforeseen connections between old and new work.

While not an exact follow-up to DiBenedetto's last curatorial effort, Loaf (2000), which involved sculpture exclusively, Slough does bring back some of the same artists.

Proposed artists include: Vito Acconci, Joe Bradley, Werner Büttner, Dan Colen, Carroll Dunham, Keith Edmier, Tony Feher, Lucio Fontana, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Eugène Leroy, Markus Lüpertz, Jon Kessler, Fabian Marcaccio, Jessica Craig Martin, Matthew McCaslin, Pat McElnea, Jonathan Meese, John Miller, Malcolm Morley, Larry Poons, Hanneline Rogeberg, Dieter Roth, Alexander Ross, Bill Schwarz, Mike Scott, Michelle Segre, Frank Stella, Philip Taaffe, and Andy Warhol, among others.

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water tank pool bosque co tx


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theres a collectors club for everything


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the big book of cattle brands

via things mag blog
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The new five-block-long mall is the largest of a series of such spaces that now stretch from the Theater District down to Herald Square and Madison Square Park. Conceived by the city’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, the plan is partly inspired by the redevelopment of downtown Copenhagen, many of whose medieval streets and plazas have been closed off to cars in the past decade.

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26125
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what kind of watch does mickey mouse wear?

a spiro t agnew watch.


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nouveau radical


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UbuWeb now hosts 1000 avant-garde films by over 500 artists in our Film and Video section. To celebrate, we've upgraded our streaming player so that finally, UbuWeb videos can be viewed full-screen as well as embedded in your web pages and blogs. Ubu would like to salute Max Fenton for making this all possible.

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studio 360

The late artist Sol LeWitt was famous for huge wall drawings created directly on the walls of a museum or a collector's home. When WNYC's Mark Phillips saw one, he decided to recreate it in his own apartment. But is it "real," or is it plagiarism?
paula coopers conclusion: no, not without a certificate.

another experts conclusion: by following instructions for wall drawing no. 1211, its a lewitt, but not resalable. if you were a garage band covering satisfaction it would be still be satisfaction.

my conclusion: ask enough people a question and eventually you will hear the answer you were hoping for.


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Producers, writers and musicians Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff founded the legendary record label Philadelphia International and helped pioneer the sound of Philadelphia soul.

Together, Gamble and Huff wrote and produced over 170 gold or platinum records, including "Love Train", "Me and Mrs. Jones" and "If You Don't Know Me By Now". Their 4 CD box set is called Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia.

In March of 2008, the duo was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.


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wolfram alpha search engine


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All this tentative handling of what might be bad news is the flip side of the secrecy which runs the art world. Failing businesses normally shout their demises from the rooftops: 90% OFF! EVERYTHING MUST GO! But the art world, with its very private faux gentility, must coat itself with the germ-killing hand-cleanser of denial. It is an emotion as old as civilization, shame, and it is driven by shame's shameless purveyors, the self-regarding wealthy, quick to snap you up when things are hot and the first to deep-freeze you when things go cold.

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from the scrap value desk:

British police say they have figured out what happened to a two-tonne Henry Moore sculpture stolen in 2005, sparking a global hunt for the thieves.

The massive bronze sculpture, known as Reclining Figure, was taken from the 28-hectare estate that is home to Moore's former studios, barns and gallery in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire — about 50 kilometres north of London — on Dec. 15, 2005.

At the time, police had surmised that the theft of the 3.4-metre-long sculpture, created 1969 to 1970, was ordered by a private art collector.

Now, they say it was probably melted down and sold for no more than £1,500 ($2,678 Cdn) as scrap metal.
via afc
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miriam from nortons kicksville 66


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marfa stewart meets steam punk on mildred's ln

i admit to being stuck in the 70's but at least i can remember the 70's. who was it comparing rockabilly clones to renaissance fair freaks? get with it people. im talking to you civil (and revolutionary) war battle reenactors.


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iphone color match ap


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Friends of the Loews Theatre finally has a solid lease agreement with Jersey City after more than five years.

pronounced: Low-ees


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beach cruisers


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plug it in


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Buffalo, N.Y., has long been a showcase for masterworks by Frank Lloyd Wright; the city is home to both the Darwin Martin House and the often overlooked Graycliff Estate. In recent years, however, "new" Frank Lloyd Wright designs—modern structures constructed from previously unbuilt Wright plans—have sprouted in the city, like the new Frank Lloyd Wright Rowing Boathouse on the Black Rock Canal along the Niagara River.

The boathouse was originally designed in 1905 for a lake in Wisconsin. Almost 10 years ago, members of Buffalo's West Side Rowing Club decided to expand their club, one of the nation's largest, while honoring Wright at the same time. Rowing Club member John Courtin, who previously worked as executive director of the Martin House Restoration Corporation, formed Frank Lloyd Wright's Rowing Boathouse Corporation to build the boathouse in Buffalo. The corporation hired Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Anthony Puttnam of Anthony Puttnam Architecture in Buffalo to work with Wright's plans, adjust them to meet modern building codes, and interpret the structure's interior design.

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predeye

scare eye [for giving birds the hairy (predator) eyeball]

also in black
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flw lego ltd edition

via vz
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Sadly, Medusirena recently announced that there are only three more shows remaining at the Wreck Bar before the Sheraton Yankee Clipper hotel closes for renovations on June 1. No one knows the fate of the net-bedecked and much treasured venue. What will it look like when the hotel is unveiled in January 2010?

No guarantees have been made, which is shame, because as far as we know this is the only Happy Hour Mermaid show left in the country.
via vz
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pictures gen


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black wax

red black and orange cheese wax

some more colors


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What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms.

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hotel made from wine barrels


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reverend jen live nude elf


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web text highlighter


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atelier a1


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Don't get me wrong, I'm totally fine with literally half a dozen men selling work back and forth to each other as many times as they like, and I wish them all happiness and rainbows. I just don't pretend it's the art world, or even the art market. And in that respect, I differ from my esteemed colleagues at the Times.

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Two comments bookend my thinking about "The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984." The first I overheard a few seconds after entering the show: "I have no appreciation for this," a woman in her seventies was saying to her friend as they stood in front of a triptych of ultra-minimal Jack Goldstein photographs. The second was an anecdote Robert Longo recounted on the audio tour, of a 15-year-old asking him recently about his well-known Men in the Cities drawings: "Did you get the idea from the iPod ad?"

The idea of different generations having distinct relationships to art and culture is central to this exhibition. These, after all, were the first American artists to be raised on a steady diet of TV and advertising, and they were among the first to understand—really understand—that art is of its moment rather than timeless and universal. (Hell, if you grow up under the novel threat of nuclear annihilation, what's really permanent?)

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Sidney Laverents dies at 100; amateur filmmaker celebrated for his humor, technical skill

YouTube: Multiple Sidosis

via vz
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So “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,” which opens on Friday at the Guggenheim Museum, will be a disappointment to some. The show offers no new insight into his life’s work. Nor is there any real sense of what makes him so controversial. It’s a chaste show, as if the Guggenheim, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, was determined to make Wright fit for civilized company.

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ACE jet 170


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mvdr

"Less is more" was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's trademark phrase, but the minimalist modern master probably wouldn't appreciate the irony. If Chicago developers get their way, there will indeed be less Mies in the world. It turns out plans to expand the city's subway system will necessitate the demolition of one of his buildings.

The structure in question sits on a corner of the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, which calls itself "the greatest collection of Mies-designed buildings in the world". It's no empty boast. SR Crown Hall, in particular, is a defining example of Mies's stripped-to-nothing, steel-and-glass purity, and the campus as a whole is a pioneering piece of planning.

But the structure in jeopardy is not exactly one of his greatest works. In fact, it's probably the crappiest building Mies ever designed: a plain little brick hut – more electricity substation than cultural artefact. Which makes the usual architectural conservation debate even trickier. It's fine to martial the troops and mount a campaign to save a threatened landmark or a neglected masterpiece, but what about when it's an extremely major architect and an extremely minor building?

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tuli on the fugs


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cyanamid


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dan colin >>birdshit<<


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ul514



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Sixty years later Salk's hunch is now backed up by empirical evidence as new research in neuroscience hints at how our surroundings affect feelings and behavior. In the current issue of Scientific American Mind, Emily Anthes describes how ceiling height, colors and other design factors influence attention and creativity. Scientists are just beginning to address these questions, in part by studying changes in brain activity as subjects make their way through virtual reality rooms.

The neuroscience of design is still in its infancy, but it has its own organization, The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego, and some architecture schools now include some basic neuroscience in their curriculum. Are we on the verge of a new field of emotionally intelligent design? Here are few early findings:

A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects--sofas, watches, etc.--subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles. Mose Bar, a neuroscientist, speculates that our brains are hard-wired to avoid sharp angles because we read them as dangerous. He used a brain scan for a similar study and found that the amygdala, a portion of the brain that registers fear, was more active when people looked at sharp-edged objects.

A study published earlier this year in the journal Science found that we remember words and other details better when surrounded by red,and that we're more creative and imaginative in the presence of blue. So if your staff is, say, proofreading or debriefing they're better off in a red room. But if they're brainstorming ideas for a new marketing campaign, blue is the color.

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The Kalita is one of only three theaters designed by Wright (photos of the other two: here and here). Completed nine months after Wright's death and two months after the New York art museum opened, the Kalita, frankly, is not the masterpiece the Guggenheim is — it lacks the open, airy gracefulness of that building's internal spiral and its radical counter-response to the city blocks around it. But as Wright's last completed building, the Kalita is something of a "little Gugenheim." It applies a number of similar ideas about form and function, this time to a theater rather than a museum, and it received national attention when it opened as an innovative design (reflecting not just Wright's thinking but also that of founding artistic director Paul Baker).

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But more often than not, what you feel is the immense strain Mr. Calatrava and his clients are under to try to justify the hall’s existence. Retail space has been added along the base of the great hall and along a second-floor balcony, which should draw a few visitors but risks transforming the entire space into one of the world’s most excessive shopping malls.

And in a particularly perverse decision PATH riders won’t be able to get from the train platforms directly to the street. Instead they will have to walk halfway along the hall’s upper balcony and past dozens of shops before exiting into one of the flanking towers — a suffocating experience no matter how beautiful the spaces turn out to be.

These problems are amplified by Mr. Calatrava’s seeming refusal to disturb the sculptural purity of his creation. Some have already pointed out that only two small entries, at each end of the dome, connect the main plaza to the hall, as if the architect were afraid of exposing his inner world to the chaos outside. I noticed something else on my visit to the show: a ring of marble benches now surrounds the base of the glass dome, so that standing in the plaza you will be able to see only a small segment of the great hall below. Instead the eye is drawn up to the grandeur of Mr. Calatrava’s structure. Life is secondary.

All of this would be discouraging enough given the number of other worthy transportation projects in New York City. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority had to redesign its new Fulton Street station to keep within its tight budget, even though it will serve thousands more passengers a day. Despite years of planning, Pennsylvania Station’s cramped dehumanizing spaces remain one of the most shameful chapters in the city’s architectural history, partly because authorities can’t find a way to pay for a renovation.

Mr. Calatrava’s design also embodies a deeper, more troubling history: the toxic climate of those first years after the Sept. 11 attacks. While the city grieved, politicians were vowing to rebuild as fast as possible, as if that would somehow accelerate the healing process. Practical considerations were set aside. Jingoism ruled. Egotism dominated over softer, gentler voices.

Under such conditions it should surprise no one that what once promised to be one of ground zero’s most triumphant architectural achievements is hollow at its core.

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The impetus behind this exhibition is the flexibility of the word slough, which has various interpretations. Pronounced slew, slough can describe a bog-like, swampy, dark, primordial and somewhat mysterious realm. The alternate and less used, but maybe also appropriate interpretation, is a state of moral degradation or spiritual dejection that one cannot extract oneself from. Pronounced sluff, slough refers to that which has been cast aside or shed off, like a skin. It can also describe the manner in which material tends to accumulate at the edges of a performed task, such as the accumulation of dust on the rim of a fan, snow on the edge of a shovel, or trash in the breakdown lane of a highway.

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The Maldives is an archipelago of 1,190 islands in the Indian Ocean, with an average elevation of four feet. Even a slight rise in global sea levels, which many scientists predict will occur by the end of this century, could submerge most of the Maldives. Last November, when Nasheed proposed moving all 300,000 Maldivians to safer territory, he named India, Sri Lanka and Australia as possible destinations and described a plan that would use tourism revenues from the present to establish a sovereign wealth fund with which he could buy a new country — or at least part of one — in the future. “We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own, and so we have to buy land elsewhere,” Nasheed said in November.

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and won. 52 original construction negatives pa hi-rise $5.99 + s&h the only bidder. again just negatives means no artifice.


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the infinite lawn / mr palomar by italo calvino

thx vz
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Though more than 4,000 Louisiana homeowners have received rebuilding money only in the last six months, or are struggling with inadequate grants or no money at all, FEMA is intent on taking away their trailers by the end of May. The deadline, which ends temporary housing before permanent housing has replaced it, has become a stark example of recovery programs that seem almost to be working against one another.

Thousands of rental units have yet to be restored, and not a single one of 500 planned “Katrina cottages” has been completed and occupied. The Road Home program for single-family homeowners, which has cost federal taxpayers $7.9 billion, has a new contractor who is struggling to review a host of appeals, and workers who assist the homeless are finding more elderly people squatting in abandoned buildings.

Nonetheless, FEMA wants its trailers back, even though it plans to scrap or sell them for a fraction of what it paid for them.

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nice pants


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rip Dom DeLuise


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Cambric or chambray is a lightweight cotton cloth used as fabric for lace and needlework. Cambric, also known as batiste in a large part of the world, was first used in Cambrai, France, as early as 1595. It is possibly named after Baptiste of Cambrai[1]. It is a closely woven, firm fabric with a slight glossy surface produced by calendering. Modern cambric is made from Egyptian or American cotton and sometimes flax, but also polymer fibres can be added. Cambric is also used as a coating for professional playing cards, to protect them for longer and make them easier to handle.

Cambric is mentioned in the song Scarborough Fair, with the lyrics "tell her to make me a cambric shirt, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme."


The early David Bowie song Come and Buy my Toys (1967) also mentions a cambric shirt. "You shall own a cambric shirt, You shall work your father's land, But now you shall play in the market square, Till you'll be a man".

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


The ballad

The song tells the tale of a young man, who tells the listener to ask his former lover to perform for him a series of impossible tasks, such as making him a shirt without a seam and then washing it in a dry well, adding that if she completes these tasks he will take her back. Often the song is sung as a duet, with the woman then giving her lover a series of equally impossible tasks, promising to give him his seamless shirt once he has finished.

As the versions of the ballad known under the title "Scarborough Fair" are usually limited to the exchange of these impossible tasks, many suggestions concerning the plot have been proposed, including the hypothesis that it is a song about the Plague. In fact, "Scarborough Fair" appears to derive from an older (and now obscure) Scottish ballad, The Elfin Knight (Child Ballad #2), which has been traced at least as far back as 1670 and may well be earlier. In this ballad, an elf threatens to abduct a young woman to be his lover unless she can perform an impossible task ("For thou must shape a sark to me / Without any cut or heme, quoth he"); she responds with a list of tasks that he must first perform ("I have an aiker of good ley-land / Which lyeth low by yon sea-strand").

As the song spread, it was adapted, modified, and rewritten to the point that dozens of versions existed by the end of the 18th century, although only a few are typically sung nowadays. The references to "Scarborough Fair" and the refrain "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme" date to nineteenth century versions, and the refrain may have been borrowed from the ballad Riddles Wisely Expounded, (Child Ballad #1), which has a similar plot.

Meaning of the refrain

Much thought has gone into attempts to explain the refrain "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme", although, as this is found only in relatively recent versions, there may not be much to explain. The oldest versions of "The Elfin Knight" (circa 1650) contain the refrain "my plaid away, my plaid away, the wind shall not blow my plaid away" (or variations thereof), which may reflect the original emphasis on the lady's chastity. Slightly younger versions often contain one of a group of related refrains:

* Sober and grave grows merry in time
* Every rose grows merry with time
* There's never a rose grows fairer with time

These are usually paired with "Once she was a true love of mine" or some variant. "Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme" may simply be an alternate rhyming refrain to the original. Folksong scholar Märta Ramsten states that folksong refrains containing enumerations of herbs — spices and medical herbs — occur in many languages, including Swedish, Danish, German, and English.

thanks AW for bringing up much of this some time back...
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two artists walking down the street
one was assaltzed


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molodesign (soft stuff)

thx vz
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lower nazareth elementry school construction photos


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un-restored

via
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29721

In 2005 I took part in a head-to-head debate on "the legacy of Modernist architecture" at a political conference. I was arguing "for". To my opponent, a Scottish architect, my citations of Bruno Taut and Berthold Lubetkin were irrelevant. Modernism was fundamentally about the baleful influence of one man: Le Corbusier. When he began by describing him as a "Swiss psychotic", it was obvious this was not going to be subtle.

Some will perennially blame Charles-Edouard Jeanneret for every under-serviced tower block, but the many discussions of Le Corbusier: the Art of Architecture - now at the Barbican, after a spell in Liverpool - have shown the solidification of a common-sense consensus. It is customary to divide his work into three facets - the city plans and collective blocks (mostly bad and "totalitarian"), the purist villas (good, albeit disturbingly bare and technocratic) and late expressionism, especially the Ronchamp church (unreservedly good, the work of a genius - the "Picasso of architecture"). This reflects neatly how architecture is perceived today - the Modernist notion of the architect as improver of mankind's lot is replaced by the superstar designer of three-dimensional logos. Le Corbusier was unquestionably adept at that, from the trademarked Modulor Man to the Chandigarh Open Hand, now a city emblem used as a stamp on the local driving licences.

By presenting an all-encompassing exhibition of the architect as Renaissance man, The Art of Architecture might seemingly offer a corrective to these pat divides. Here is a highly un-purist mass of stuff - models, paintings, magazines, films, chairs, found objects, plans, adverts, saucy postcards. Yet this chameleon and dialectician can't quite be united into a consistent whole, and the last thing you will find here is "development" in his work, ever progressing and refining itself (as one might in an exhibition devoted to, say, Mies). Instead there are breaks and ruptures. One would have to have absurdly catholic tastes to approve of everything, and only the most dedicated architectural neocon could hate it all. If there is any narrative here, it runs from an early immersion in a Mediterranean Classicism, to the right angles and urban visions of the 1920s, a brief flirtation with constructivism, and then from the mid-1930s onwards, an increasingly organic conception of form.
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The 42,000-square-foot building, smack dab in the heart of Manhattan’s garment district, has 11 stories and 70 rehearsal studios, most of which are about 350 square feet. Since its inception in 1979, the building has enjoyed 100 percent capacity, according to Lerner, and averages about 150 bands; many bands sublease their space to other musicians. Among the artists who have called The Music Building home at various times in their careers include Madonna, Interpol, the Strokes and the New York Dolls (pictured).

“Part of what our artists pay for is the peace of mind that their most prized possession, their equipment, is safe and secure,” Lerner said, adding that the studios feature steel doors and heavy duty locks.

Rents average between $1,300 and $1,600 per month, and musicians have 24-hour, seven-day-a-week access to building. Lerner said the most popular rehearsal time seems to be after 10 pm, and passersby can hear full-on jams at 2 am.

“Manhattan is really pushing out a lot the cultural facilities throughout the city,” Lerner said, alluding to CBGB’s, which featured many artists who have rehearsed at The Music Building, such as the Dolls and Patti Smith, among others. “We’ve been able to maintain the building as a rehearsal space and make it profitable financially, partly because there’s a true need for it. As long as there are artists who want to play and practice at various times, there will be a need for us.”

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She pointed out the parlor and a living room lined with Cheever’s books (an eclectic collection that includes his friends Bellow, Updike and Lauren Bacall), but curiously there is no study. He wrote on an Underwood typewriter or portable Olivetti in a guest room, his daughter Susan’s room after she moved out, and in a small room above an Ossining barbershop that he rented for a time.

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