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fresh air - Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, talks about his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson theorizes that businesses can profit by giving it all away on the internet.
nyt book review
So Honda attacked with niceness. Honda’s larger Dream and Benly bikes couldn’t compete against the British alternatives, but the Super Cub (called the Honda 50 in America in deference to Piper Aircraft’s trademarks), faced little competition.
With its step-through design and molded plastic body panels, the Honda 50 looked too toylike to attract the socially maladjusted. Its quiet 49 cc (that’s three cubic inches) four-stroke engine claimed a modest output of 4.5-horsepower.
It was a product for which Honda could recruit dealers; by 1961 there were 500 across the country selling the $249 bike. And Honda backed them with a clever ad campaign built around the slogan “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.” Suddenly motorcycling was a hip and happy thing to do instead of a menacing ride along society’s margins.
JB Lenoir (the JB doesn't stand for anything, the last name pronounced len-Or), was born in Monticello, Mississippi, March 5, 1929.
last night on the waterfront was on tcm (again). it reminded me of this brilliant village voice report from 2006 which included the true story of tommy hanley.
"That's how it always was," said Tommy Hanley, 66, who started working on the docks when he was 17, three years after he portrayed Marlon Brando's young pal in the memorable rooftop pigeon-coop scenes of On the Waterfront.
"You say something," said Hanley, "and someone in the back of the room says, 'Sit down. You're doing all right. You're working, ain'tcha?' "
Last spring, Hanley, who for years lost out on hours and promotions because he refused to pay off the mob's henchmen, was elected a shop steward at Global Terminal, the local's largest employer, replacing a long line of mob-selected enforcers.
"It was the first legit elections I seen in my 49 years on the piers," said Hanley.
The unlikely revolution at Local 1588 began three years ago when U.S. District Court Judge John Martin was presented with evidence of massive corruption at the union and agreed to appoint a federal administrator to run the 450-member local's affairs. The judge's orders were to do whatever was necessary to rid the local of mob influence and set it on a path to self-rule.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word "ghost" appeared as early as 900 AD as gast. A gast is a spirit, or as the OED tells us, a "principle of life." "Agast" or "Aghast" thus signals a reaction upon seeing a "gast" -- white knuckles, quickened heartbeats, uncontrollable sweating become evidence that someone has taken fright at an apparition ... that someone has seen a ghost.
For his book Spectral Evidence (2005), critic Ulrich Baer explains how photography facilitates such a reaction. He notes how "In the photograph, time itself seems to have been carved up and ferried, unscathed, into the viewer's present". A photograph therefore does much more than provide evidence of something that happened a long time ago. A photograph is a record, yet it is also a form of transport, a conveyance that interrupts and forces the spectral traces of a forgotten past into a familiar present.
Architectural discourse has made similar use of photography. A photograph of a building in a book or magazine guarantees architecture's afterlife. A picture ensures that a tabled project, bombed-out residence, or failed city plan will live past its own death. A photograph also becomes the primary means for transmission of an idea for a building. A case in point would be the various photographs of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House appearing in various publications in the 1950s -- these images would be an important point of reference for the Smithson's Hunstanton School (1949-1954). But consider a more controversial example -- Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (1949) . Though Johnson was no doubt familiar with the photographs of the Farnsworth House in publications, he famously quipped that his house, with its abstracted frame and dominating central hearth was inspired by the ruins he saw in 1939, as a correspondent following Wehrmacht troops as they crossed into Poland. The Glass House then operates in a similar fashion as a photograph -- the building's imageability not only records a Miesian precedent, but also suggests the idea of something that happened before. But this is only to reaffirm that photography's promises are twofold: in addition to a guarantee of an eternal life of sorts for architecture, by preserving its forms and volumes for future consumption, photographs also help disseminate a rich visual record to be adopted by generations of future designers.