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Pocket Universe: Virtual Sky Astronomy 3.4

in case dr wilson isnt around but the stars are
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the history of drive-in theaters


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woods hole study not so bright outlook

science news has multiple news stories
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A new study finds oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico from a ruptured BP well degraded at a rate that was "much faster than anticipated," thanks to the interaction of a newly-found and unclassified species of microbes with the oil particles.
The findings of the report appeared in the journal Science last Thursday.
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de maderas y sombras – shimuraya bar


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pallet house


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Bourriaud claims that the new relational models are principled responses to real social misery and alienation. But he acknowledges that the artists he writes about are not concerned with changing the system of social relations – capitalism, in our language. Relational artists tend to accept what Bourriaud calls “the existing real” and are happy to play with “the social bond” within the constraining frame of the given. Bourriaud tries to put the best face on this kind of practice, characterizing it as “learning to inhabit the world in a better way.” (p. 13) But in spite of his approving allusions to Marx, there is no mistaking that this is a form of artistic interpretation of the world that does not aim to overcome the system of organized exploitation and domination. At most, relational art attempts to model the bandaging of social damage and to “patiently re-stitch the social fabric”: “Through little services rendered, the artists fill in the cracks in the social bond.” (p.36)

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on the origins of reality tv:
ancient travel literature < travel journalism < adventure novel < travelogue documentary < road rules

The idea of a trip around the world within a set period had clear external origins and was popular before Verne published his book in 1872. Even the title Around the World in Eighty Days is not original to Verne. About six sources[5] have been suggested as the origins of the story, as follows:

Greek traveller Pausanias (c. 100 AD) wrote a work that was translated into French in 1797 as Voyage autour du monde ("Aro/aund the World"). Verne's friend, Jacques Arago, had written a very popular Voyage autour du monde in 1853. However in 1869/70 the idea of travelling around the world reached critical popular attention when three geographical breakthroughs occurred: the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in America (1869), the linking of the Indian railways across the sub-continent (1870), and the opening of the Suez Canal (1869). In 1871 appeared Around the World by Steam, via Pacific Railway, published by the Union Pacific Railroad Company, and an Around the World in A Hundred and Twenty Days by Edmond Planchut. Between 1869 and 1871, an American William Perry Fogg went around the world describing his tour in a series of letters to the Cleveland Leader, titled Round the World: Letters from Japan, China, India, and Egypt (1872). Additionally, in early 1870, the Erie Railway Company published a statement of routes, times, and distances detailing a trip around the globe of 23,739 miles in seventy-seven days and twenty-one hours.[6]

In 1872 Thomas Cook organised the first around the world tourist trip, leaving on 20 September 1872 and returning seven months later. The journey was described in a series of letters that were later published in 1873 as Letter from the Sea and from Foreign Lands, Descriptive of a tour Round the World. Scholars have pointed out similarities between Verne's account and Cook's letters, although some argue that Cook's trip happened too late to influence Verne.[5] Verne, according to a second-hand 1898 account, refers to a Thomas Cook advertisement as a source for the idea of his book.[5] In interviews in 1894 and 1904, Verne says the source was "through reading one day in a Paris cafe" and "due merely to a tourist advertisement seen by chance in the columns of a newspaper.”[5] Around the World itself says the origins were a newspaper article. All of these point to Cook's advert as being a probable spark for the idea of the book.[5]

Further, the periodical Le Tour du monde (3 October 1869) contained a short piece entitled "Around the World in Eighty Days", which refers to "140 miles" of railway not yet completed between Allahabad and Bombay, a central point in Verne's work.[5] But even the Le Tour de monde article was not entirely original; it cites in its bibliography the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, de la Géographie, de l'Histoire et de l'Archéologie (August, 1869), which also contains the title Around the World in Eighty Days in its contents page.[5] The Nouvelles Annales were written by Conrad Malte-Brun (1775—1826) and his son Victor Adolphe Malte-Brun (1816—1889).[5] Scholars believe Verne was aware of either the Le Tour de monde article, or the Nouvelles Annales (or both), and consulted it — the 'Le Tour du monde even included a trip schedule very similar to Verne's final version.[5]

A possible inspiration was the traveller George Francis Train, who made four trips around the world, including one in 80 days in 1870. Similarities include the hiring of a private train and his being imprisoned. Train later claimed "Verne stole my thunder. I'm Phileas Fogg."[5]

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One of the great stories surrounding MoMA's 1965 exhibition "The Responsive Eye" is how collector/garmento Larry Aldrich turned several Op paintings he owned into fabrics, and then into dresses, which fed into the Op Art Trend that was apparently swirling around New York. Of course, it's a great story if you're not named Bridget Riley.

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trotline


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I - 95


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msp

It's the "Taliesin Palette" of colors that Wright designed in collaboration with Martin-Senour Paints, with production beginning in 1955. In searching the net further I discovered a reference to Martin-Senour producing the same palette as recently as 1997. I placed a call to Martin-Senour and found out that their agreement with the Foundation ended around 10 years ago - so it's no longer in production. I asked if they would/could do something similar to what Pittsburgh Paints had done (i.e. - tell me how to get equivalent paint chips to their FLW palette, even though they were no longer licenced to produce it). The woman at Martin-Senour was very helpful and eventually faxed me a list that showed the comparable colors from the Taliesin Palette to those in Martin-Senour paints. There were 36 colors in the 1955 palette that somehow had morphed into 40 by 1997. She said there was one possible problem, though, in trying to match the FLW palette to Martin-Senour colors: beginning in 2007, the company had begun a change-over of their entire color palette and no longer would be producing paint chip-equivalents of the the Taliesin Line. Her suggestion to me was to call my local Martin-Senour paint store rep and ask if they had any fan-chips (multiple chips in one strip) left over from their previous palette - the Designer's Palette. I called - and they did. I drove over and with the help of the store rep was successful in matching up about 85- 90% of the entire palette with what was still available from the Designer's Palette chips.

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the Rodale Institute


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cricket


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Spanning Time: America's Covered Bridges

njn2
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dh air guitar (PDF Warning)


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"Photography Not Art" Naturalism according to P.H. Emerson (1886-1895)


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the rolling stones genuine black box bootleg 6 cd set


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baby the rain must fall


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The first thing we talked about was that NOAA report. Steiner said it was obviously full of guesswork -- and bad guesswork at that. "They shouldn't have even tried to issue these numbers right now," he said. "I smell politics all over it. The only plausible explanation is they were in a rush to hang the 'Mission Accomplished' banner."

And Steiner suspects the 10 percent recovery rate for BP is actually overstated. The report based its conclusions on operational reports showing that 11.1 million gallons of oil were burned and 34.7 million gallons of oily water were recovered through skimming.

But Steiner said the actual amount of oil recovered could be about half what the report claims. The oil-water mix, which officials evidently assumed was 20 percent oil, could well have been closer to 10 percent, he said. As for the burned oil figures, "they are simply coming from the BP contractors out there and then put into the Incident Command reports as gospel. As far as I know, there was no independent observation or estimation of those numbers."

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Housing will eventually recover from its great swoon. But many real estate experts now believe that home ownership will never again yield rewards like those enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century, when houses not only provided shelter but also a plump nest egg.
analysis
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keep these off the usa


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he who gets slapped


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1967 sunbeam alpine series V


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slab city


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easton church

easton 1884 stone church / Commercial & Office Space for Sale Sq feet: 14,584 sq. ft. / $125k


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eastonth

easton 3 story brick end townhouse 4 br / $60k


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Q: In the '60s, you were among the first to try to bridge the gap between high and low cultures. Now, after three decades, we've seen high culture, or the so-called canon, besieged by popular culture and multiculturalism. We have today a new sensibility that, depending on one's perspective, either surpasses or parodies the kind of sensibility that you heralded in the last essay of Against Interpretation (1966). We now live in an age of total eclecticism and global interpenetration, which many people, including myself, call the postmodern. So far, your reaction to postmodernism seems largely inimical. And you refused to allow the Camp sensibility that you helped make famous to be co-opted by the postmodernists because "Camp taste... still presupposes the older, high standards of discrimination" ("Writing Itself" 439).

SS: I never thought I was bridging the gap between high and low cultures. I am unquestioningly, without any ambiguity or irony, loyal to the canon of high culture in literature, music, and the visual and performing arts. But I've also enjoyed a lot of popular music, for example. It seemed we were trying to understand why that was perfectly possible and why that wasn't paradoxical... and what diversity or plurality of standards might be. However, it didn't mean abolishing hierarchy, it didn't mean equating everything. In some sense I was as much a partisan or supporter of traditional cultural hierarchy as any cultural conservative, but I didn't draw the hierarchy in the same way.... Take an example: just because I loved Dostoevsky didn't mean that I couldn't love Bruce Springsteen. Now, if somebody says you have to choose between Russian literature or rock 'n roll, of course I'd choose Russian literature. But I don't have to choose. That being said, I would never argue that they're equally valuable. But I was very struck by how rich and diverse one's experiences are. Consequently, it seems to me a lot of cultural commentators were lying about the diversity of their experiences. On the other hand, there are a lot of things in mass culture that didn't appeal to me, notably what's on television. It seems very non-nourishing, conventional, bland, trivial. So it wasn't a question of bridging the gap. It's simply that I saw a lot of simultaneity in my experiences of pleasure, and felt that most discourse about culture was either philistine or shallowly snobbish. So it wasn't this is "here," and that's "there," and I can make a bridge. It was that I understood myself to have many kinds of experiences and pleasures, and I was trying to understand why that was possible, and how you could still maintain a hierarchical sense of values.

This is not the sensibility that's called the postmodern--by the way, that's not the word I use or find useful to use. I associate postmodernism with leveling and with recycling. The word modernism arose in architecture. It has a very specific meaning. It meant the Bauhaus School, Corbusier, the box skyscraper, the rejection of ornament. Form is function. There are all sorts of modernist dogmas in architecture, which came to prevail not only because of their aesthetic values. There was a material support for these ideas: it's cheaper to build buildings this way. Anyway, when the term postmodernism began to be used across the field for all the arts it became inflated. Indeed, many writers who used to be called modern or modernist are now called postmodern because they recycle, use quotations--I'm thinking of Donald Barthelme, for instance--or practice what's called intertextuality.

Q: Yes, the way writers are being relabelled as postmodern is at times baffling. For example, I was startled when Fredric Jameson, whose work I greatly admire, cited Beckett--who for me is a terminal product of high modernism--as a postmodern author.

SS: Jameson is the leading scholar who has tried to make more sense of the category of postmodernism. One of the reasons I remain unconvinced by his use of the term is that I don't think he's interested in the arts. Not really. Not even in literature. He's interested in ideas. If he cared about literature he wouldn't have quoted--at great length--Norman Mailer. While you illustrate your ideas with quotations from novels, you're also implicitly suggesting to people that they read these books. I think that either Jameson doesn't know that Mailer isn't a very good writer, or that he doesn't care. Another example is when Van Gogh and Warhol are treated as equivalent by Jameson for the sake of theory-building, for fitting examples into his theory. That's when I get off the bus. In my view, what's called postmodernism--that is, the making everything equivalent--is the perfect ideology for consumerist capitalism. It is an idea of accumulation, of preparing people for their shopping expeditions. These are not critical ideas....

Susan Sontag

via hyeprion fb
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typebutterfly

telex, teletype and early examples of computer art

(mad / haha, wont cut and paste easily)
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25 bond


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bitter mellon


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A group of scientists says that as much as 79 percent of the BP oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico is still present. The scientists released a report this week to counter a rosier picture presented by the federal government that says three-quarters of the oil was recovered, dissolved, burned, skimmed or dispersed. Whichever report is right, so much oil spilled, that millions of barrels of oil still threaten the Gulf ecosystem. And most of the remaining oil cannot be cleaned up.

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A 22-mile-long invisible mist of oil is meandering far below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where it will probably loiter for months or more, scientists reported Thursday in the first conclusive evidence of an underwater plume from the BP spill.

The most worrisome part is the slow pace at which the oil is breaking down in the cold, 40-degree water, making it a long-lasting but unseen threat to vulnerable marine life, experts said.

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nice collection of coal chute holes with carved water diversion grooves images. but please can all the mumbo-jumbo design speak. only the slightest mention of their real purpose. signs are of a secondary nature and coal chute grooves were purpose built to keep the basements a little dryer. all coal chutes used to have iron lids (manhole covers). the ones with cement patches had their lids stolen for scrap value first and later by hipsters for cool looking table tops. coal used to be delivered at the street and was stored in a bin below street level near the furnace. this is all relatively recent history, less that 100 years. please, just the facts mam!

via bldblog who seamed to ignore the bs
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'71 IH scout 800b


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la singularidad de lo obvio - paper mill museum

sweet stairs! (more from jb's links)
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Despite an ever-expanding estimate of the volume of the spill, relatively little oil washes ashore at first, and only a small portion ever will. Instead, trapped in the deep, the oil fouls the ocean's twilight and dark zones: the mesopelagic and the bathypelagic (bathos: deep). After April 20, the dumbwaiter rising through the waters of the Gulf of Mexico will be ascending an ocean fouled with a toxic broth of oil, methane, chemical dispersants, and drilling mud. The relatively small amounts of oil washing ashore, and the relief felt when the surface oil began to dissipate, hardly account for the devastation being wrought in the dark world beyond our sight.
via hyperion fb
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W.A. Mozart - Adagio for Glass Armonica in C-Major, KV 617a


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1400 easton
1400 Easton Rd, Kintnersville, PA – $375,000 July 21, 2010 by Joe Leone · Leave a Comment 5100 Sf Mixed Use Commercial Property in Durham Twp on busy Route 611. Three commercial storefronts on first floor. Storefront #1 consists of 1885 sf with Roll Up side door and formally used as antique store. Storefront #2 Consists of 600 sf currently vacant, Storefront #3 consists of 560 sf and is vacant. Second Floor consists of 1800 sf 3 BR apartment. Zoned PC-1. AS of Right Uses include Restaurant, Retail, Service Business, Financial Establishment, Veterinary Clinic, Auto Repair, Car Wash, Offices, Medical Offices, Motel / Hotel, Community Center, Commercial School, Manufacturing, Wholesale Business, Truck Terminal, Auto Sales & Nursery. Conditional Uses include Kennel, Mini Market, Amusement Hall, and Professional Studios. Special Exception Uses include Tavern & Adult Commercial Use. Located on Route 611 (Easton Rd) Property is adjacent to Delaware River Canal. Triangular shaped Site. Parcel is in 100 Year Flood Plain. Close to Routes 212, 412, I-78


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1st look at 9/11 museum


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Impruneta terracotta


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The Boomerang or Skylark Formica pattern by Brooks Stevens in 1950 and updated by Raymond Loewy in 1954


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Recycled Island


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amoeba1
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Calder asked Duchamp, "What should I call these things. " Duchamp replied, "Mobiles, " this was a French pun, which meant motive and motion. Jean Paul Sartre described the mobile as, " The mobile is a little private celebration, an object defined by its movement and having no other existence. A mobile does not suggest anything. It captures genuine living movements. Mobiles have no meaning, they are, that is all. " In Calder's early years as an artist, it seems he was systematic in his approach to "composing motions." Later, having perfected his technical methods, he became ever more inventive with his moving sculpture. The most engaging aspect of Calder's sculpture was its interaction with space. Mobiles participated in lively dialogues with their environs, reacting to air currents and human touch. The stabiles enfolded and incorporated spatial volume. As Calder put it: "I paint with shapes."

During this time, Calder fell under the spell of Leger, Duchamp, Arp, Klee, and Picasso. His greatest influence however was Miro who was a direct inspiration for many of the shapes that he used. Miro’s biomorphic motif survived in Calder's art until the end of his life. Calder’s sculpture was the perfect marriage of abstraction and movement. Einstein once visited a Calder show and stood transfixed for forty minutes in front of a work called Universe. By 1937, Calder was thinking of making monumental public sculptures of his works. He refused to call his work art, "I call them objects, that way no one can come along and say, these aren’t sculptures, it washes my hands of having to define them."

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Biomorphism is an art movement that began in the 20th century.

The term was first used in 1936, by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Biomorphist art focuses on the power of natural life and uses organic shapes, with shapeless and vaguely spherical hints of the forms of biology. Biomorphism has connections with Surrealism and Art Nouveau.


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jens risom amoeba coffee table 1941


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noguchi

There was the time I went to Hawaii in 1939 to do an advertisement (with Georgia O'Keefe and Pierre Roy). As a result of this I had met Robsjohn Gibbings, the furniture designer, who had asked me to do a coffee table for him. ( I had already done a table for Conger Goodyear). I designed a small model in plastic and heard no further before I went west.

While interned in Poston I was surprised to see a variation of this published as a Gibbings advertisement. When, on my return I remonstrated, he said anybody could make a three-legged table. In revenge, I made my own variant of my own table, articulated as the Goodyear Table, but reduced to rudiments. It illustrated an article by George Nelson called 'How to Make a Table'. This is the Coffee Table that was later sold in such quantity by the Herman Miller Furniture Company.

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007 arp

In 1915 Arp was commissioned to decorate the interior walls of a theosophical institute in Paris. He cut large paper shapes in a variety of colors and covered the walls with these "lyrical abstractions," as Richter called them. In 1916 these paper shapes evolved into amoeba-like wood reliefs which Arp painted in various colors, cut rounded holes into, superimposed in several layers, and hung on walls. Although given names suggesting representational images, few of these sculptures were anything but abstract flights of fancy. Speaking of Arp's sculpture, Robert Melville wrote in Arp that many of Arp's works could "be described as the relief maps of a poetic cosmogony: they appear to relate to Arp's avowed interest in the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and in particular to their speculations upon the originative material of things and the coherence of the natural world." Thomas B. Hess, writing in ARTNews, found that Arp's sculpture exhibited a kind of mysticism set off by his "balancing force, wit. It combines with all his philosophies to set up an equilibrium and tension of form and content."

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aalto ice cube tray


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like a broken pediment

"Ms. MacLear said that Johnson was known for weak drawing skills. He had a “high-concept” sketching style, she said. "


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enid collins of texas - bejeweled wooden handbags


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farm security admin color images of the effect of the depression on rural america


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image page 8

Id: PA3501 PENNSYLVANIA Bucks
Camp Dormitory No. 1
City: PIPERSVILLE VIC.
Address: Old Easton Rd. at Tohickon Creek
HABS code: PA-6207-A (WASO)
SECONDARY NAMES: (No. assigned WASO 6-20-96 Brian C.)
ASSOCIATED NAMES: Kahn,Louis I.,architect
DATES COMPLETED: c1947
NOTES: HABS/HAER: 1996 Peterson Prize.
DOCUMENTATION: Drawings: 6 Photos: 8 Photo Caption pages: 1, drawings,
Written data
Location: HABS/HAER


brynmawr edu

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'Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970' Thomas S. Hines fleshes out the heroes of L.A. architecture with a smart look at their most important buildings.


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the new farewell mills gatsch hyperbolic-paraboloid roofed snack stand at lk tbh.

snack stand

Its walls are made from concrete block the color of wet cardboard, and the mortar that holds them together seems to have been squeezed straight from a tube. You won't see a single window when you arrive at the Trenton Bath House, never mind a conventional front door.

The New Jersey summer camp that commissioned this little pool house from Philadelphia's Louis Kahn didn't think much of the results. Kahn finished the building in the scorching summer of 1955, and was immediately fired from the project. Then, the European and Japanese tourists started showing up.

The spartan pool building that Kahn created for the Trenton Jewish Community Center isn't the sort of architecture you fall in love with at first sight. It's too plain and too cerebral, especially in an age when judgments are often made from photographic eye candy. The Trenton Bath House is a building that hides its wisdom in cool, shadowy corners, and is best experienced in person.
the bathhouse was featured at its most dilapidated state in the L Kahn 2003 documentary my architect made by kahns son. its a corker! glad the reno is finally complete.

this is a little disconcerting: "The architects also contributed one of the missing pieces that Kahn didn't get to design properly: a snack bar. Similarly modest, its walls are built from concrete block, but of a newer vintage. Its cedar roof flutters up like a butterfly wing, in contrast to Kahn's downward pitch."

video tour

the bath house homepage

the other bath house homepage


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notes on anvil! the story of anvil

although the film reads sweetly natural bordering on naive, i suspect the (spoiler alert) victorious ending was in place from the start with the emotional ups and downs leading up merely allowed to play out. that is, its all a tactical career intervention by the films producer/director (hollywood insider and original uk uber-fan) sacha gervasi. thus a career resurrected an injustice corrected. for instance: the rock star interviews, the lawyer in prauge, the influential japanese fan, the record producer signing on (for a fee) and finally the huge show in japan all results of the director making key phone calls. "hey, its sacha gervasi. i'm doing a documentary on anvil ...blah, blah, blah and we really need you on board." still, its a worthwhile film and a good watch (you laugh, you cringe, you cry). and its nice to see an injustice, if not fully corrected, at least nudged in the right direction. a quick check of their website indicates two festival bookings in the next couple of months. ImI ImI


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swell


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nyc newspaper quoting government report gives sunny out look on oil spill damage


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Dialectics becomes materialist when the primacy of the object is established; yet, Adorno warns, “the primacy of the object notwithstanding, the thingness of the world is also illusory. It tempts the subjects to ascribe to the things themselves the social conditions of their production. This is elaborated in Marx’s chapter on the fetish …”13 What is crucial for Adorno is to combine “tenacious opposition against that which exists: against its thingness,” with a staunch rejection of attempts to identify thingness as evil.14 “In thingness there is an intermingling of both the object’s unidentical side and the subjection of people under the prevailing forms of production—their own functional relations, which are obscure to them.”15 While, on the one hand, thingness (das Dinghafte) stands for the subjection of people under alienating and mystifying forms of production; on the other, the thing stands for the non-identical, for that which escapes the clutch of instrumental reason. It does so more fully than the object, which is “the positive face of the non-identical”; in other words, “a terminological mask.”16 Objecthood is thingness objectified, subjected to concepts in the same way that a subject is a person become concept, a legal-philosophical abstraction; a thing is to an object as a person is to a subject.
via st fb
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wireless crystal radio set


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