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"The travel industry is sitting on the last virgin territory in the entire world," says Kirby Jones, the president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association. "Americans want to go there for the same reason that dozens of companies around the world have. There's money to be made."
Ian Schrager, the New York entrepreneur who helped create the trend for stylish boutique hotels with the Royalton in Manhattan, the Delano in Miami Beach and the Mondrian in Los Angeles, went to Cuba in 1994-95. "I was completely enchanted with the country," he says. "I was completely taken with it. To me what was interesting was Old Havana, like Venice, a special place frozen in time."
The two weeks of Mardi Gras parades and parties have for decades been the city's binding cord, bringing together all segments of society and thousands of outsiders for a mix of the sacred and the profane. But with planning for the February Carnival season now under way, Mardi Gras has been plagued by harsh financial realities, indecision, lowered expectations and the possibility that this year's parade lineup could be absent some of its most popular krewes, or social clubs.
After the city announced plans for smaller and fewer Mardi Gras parades, dissatisfied krewes protested. Responding to the pressure, an advisory panel to Mayor C. Ray Nagin recommended Wednesday that an additional weekend be included in an abbreviated Mardi Gras parade season. The mayor is expected to agree to a pre-Lenten Carnival season of eight days, instead of the customary 12, culminating Feb. 28 on Mardi Gras Day (known in English as Fat Tuesday).
WFMU will be featured on New York Noise -- the NYC-area local access cable video show. In addition to an hour's worth of cool videos, there'll be footage shot at the Record Fair, and cameos by a number of WFMU DJs. The WFMU feature will air on NYC cable channel 25 on November 19th at 10 PM, December 2nd at 9 PM, and December 4th at 10 PM. More info on New York Noise can be found here.tape it tivo it watch it
TWOJ Baudrillard (Annotated Bibliography)
9-11 Probers Leave Questions Behind
The private watchdog group formed by the former members of the 9-11 Commission is closing up shop. The announcement of its last media event—a December 5 briefing where the 9-11 Discourse Project "will issue its final assessment of progress on all 9/11 Commission recommendations"—came today. This is no surprise: The project (funded by entities like the Carnegie Corporation, the Drexel Family Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) was intended to last for just a year after the commission expired in August 2004, its mission to "educate the public on the issue of terrorism and what can be done to make the country safer." But even if this end was long planned, it doesn't mean everyone thinks the job is finished.
"I think it's really ironic that they are closing up shop at a time when their credibility is being called into question because of Able Danger," says Debra Burlingame, whose brother was pilot of the plane that hijackers flew into the Pentagon.
Able Danger is the secret military intelligence unit featured in stories published this summer in which military officers claimed that they had information about lead hijacker Mohammed Atta a year before the 9-11 attack. What's more, the sources of the story claim they told the 9-11 commission about it, but that information was left out of the final report. The 9-11 commissioners have dismissed the story as overblown, claiming in an op-ed piece just this week that their staff checked out the story and found no evidence it was true.
Able Danger isn't the only question that people keep asking. People who lost firefighters sons, husbands, and brothers still want answers regarding the issues of command & control and radio communication. "The questions that remain unanswered are the whole stuff of chapter 9," says Sally Regenhard, founder of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, who lost her firefighter son in the towers. "What happened to New York?" Others feel the commission played politics with its finding that Iraq and al Qaeda had no meaningful connections. And Burlingame feels the commission was never disposed to really examine what damage was done by the legal "wall" separating intelligence and criminal investigations at the FBI, since one of the commissioners, Jamie Gorelick, played a role in interpreting that rule during her Justice Department stint under Bill Clinton. Other commission members had similar conflicts on other issues, leading to a lot of recusals.
"How did a group of 9/11 families go from being seen as the entirely sympathetic victims of perhaps America’s greatest tragedy to being viewed as a self-interested obstructionist force that could hold up ground zero’s progress for years, banishing any sign of cultural life downtown—except, perhaps, for the culture of mourning?"The Grief Police - No one says the 9/11 families aren’t entitled to their pain. But should a small handful of them have the power to reshape ground zero?
What Bernstein and his IFC colleagues hadn’t counted on was the families. Ielpi and other family activists had long ago come to believe that the memorial for the September 11 victims should be much larger and more prominent than ground-zero developers had envisioned. They saw the IFC as competition—not just for land but for the public’s attention and, not least, charitable donations. In private meetings, they argued that the IFC would take the emphasis away from what happened to their loved ones—and would even use some of the artifacts from the disaster, like Fritz Koenig’s Sphere sculpture from the Twin Towers’ plaza, that they wanted for their memorial. The IFC was meant to be aboveground, the memorial below; the families complained that visitors to ground zero would be distracted by the IFC and its street-level cultural center before they descended to the memorial.
When their lobbying didn’t succeed, they took the battle to another level. In June, a Wall Street Journal op-ed by a 9/11 family member named Debra Burlingame all but accused the IFC of being a left-wing Trojan horse, suggesting that intellectual elites were trying to sneak a blame-America museum onto sacred ground. Under the Take Back the Memorial banner, the family members made the rounds on cable talk shows, appeared before Congress, and were cheered on by right-wing blogs. The PR battle was fought until September, when Governor George Pataki, who had once called for an array of cultural institutions to rise from the ashes, yanked the IFC from the plan for downtown that he largely controls. Burlingame and Take Back the Memorial were victorious.
Now Ielpi, clearly emboldened, makes it plain that the IFC’s defeat was just the beginning. With him on the twentieth floor this morning is Michael Kuo, whose father, Frederick Kuo Jr., perished in the south tower and who is using his master’s degree in urban planning to help Ielpi with his latest project—the establishment of the Tribute Center, a tiny family-initiated visitor center opening soon, next door to the shrouded Deutsche Bank building. Staring out at a stirring, unobstructed view of the pit, the two men present their long-term wish list for all sixteen acres. First, they and the other members of Take Back the Memorial want a memorial that, unlike the current underground Arad design, would dominate the revived site, an unmissable reminder to all Americans of Ielpi’s and the other families’ darkest day. To that end, Take Back the Memorial would like to commandeer the proposed cultural building, or at least its parcel. If the group is successful, that would inflate the exhibition space for the World Trade Center Memorial and Museum to about four times that of the Holocaust Museum.
That’s not all. Next, Ielpi points out the outline of the Twin Towers’ foundations, which the families are fighting in court to have completely preserved, like a Roman ruin; to win that one, they would have to stop construction on the new Santiago Calatrava–designed PATH Terminal, which broke ground this month. To the northeast is the Gehry performing-arts-center site; some family members are uncomfortable with the idea of, as some have put it, dancing on the graves of victims. Then there’s the surrounding scheme for 600,000 square feet of retail space, which some families would like to screen for taste (no Victoria’s Secret, thank you)—and Larry Silverstein’s five planned commercial skyscrapers, including the Freedom Tower, the tenants of which the families may also have something to say about (Middle Eastern businesses, on ground zero?).
After the Avant-garde Sylvère Lotringer
One thing about the avant-garde is that it's mostly humorless. Dada is the glaring exception, but it never was a group to speak of; there were too many holes everywhere. Dada never took itself seriously, didn't even capitalize its name. Andre Breton and his men, on the other hand, capitalized on everything. Breton published the famous Anthology of Black Humor although had no sense of humor to speak of and was color blind. He was a totally uptight little man. Didn't he say that he would never show himself naked in front of a woman if he were not in a glorious state of erection? No wonder he kept his hair long and wore a cape. I don't think he would have ever dropped his pants in front of the Academy as Kafka's chimpanzee did. Kafka's monkey obviously had nothing glorious to show, or to prove, all he wanted was finding a way out , certainly not a way in. He'd been wounded and captured, so he copied human ways as monkeys do in order to be let out of his cage. He couldn't care less about the Academy, just repaid them in their own coin, showing them his ass in lieu of his wound. This is what the avant-garde is supposed to do, drop its pants in front of academies, and not lick their ass.
The avant-garde never monkeyed their way out of their cage. On the contrary, they tried everything to be admitted to the club . Why otherwise would they spend all their time abusing everybody around, like the Situationists? It wasn't exactly the way to keep their distance. The avant-garde wanted everyone to pay attention to them, especially those they attacked. In reality, they became the watchdog of the art world, its most indispensable appendage. It is not surprising then that it was rewarded posthumously. It was all a con-game. They were the bouncers of the art club, standing at the door and keeping the others waiting in the cold. The most exclusive and nasty they were, the more seductive. That's also what happened to French Theory in America. Everyone begged to be let in, terrorized at the thought that could be left out. And then they moved on to something else. They couldn't care less what it was all about and it didn't change anything in their lives. All they cared for was their glorious erection.
The Academy had no way of knowing whether the chimpanzee was candid or pulling their leg. That's what I like so much about humor - it remains imperceptible. The chimpanzee was playing with the code upheld by the Academy and they were too uptight to admit it, or even know for sure that he was challenging them. The real challenge that humor raises is its very existence. And even if it is recognized for what it is, there's nothing much one can do about it. You're damned if you do and damn if you don't. But this is what gets people thinking.
lori landay semiotics teaching notes
the new yorker
“ ‘The illusion of desire has been lost in the ambient pornography and contemporary art has lost the desire of illusion,’ ” he began. “ ‘After the orgies and the liberation of all desires, we have moved into the transsexual, the transparency of sex, with signs and images erasing all its secrets and ambiguity.’ ”
After he read, Baudrillard expanded on his theme. “We say that Disneyland is not, of course, the sanctuary of the imagination, but Disneyland as hyperreal world masks the fact that all America is hyperreal, all America is Disneyland,” he said. “And the same for art. The art scene is but a scene, or obscene”—he paused for chuckles from the audience—“mask for the reality that all the world is trans-aestheticized. We have no more to do with art as such, as an exceptional form. Now the banal reality has become aestheticized, all reality is trans-aestheticized, and that is the very problem. Art was a form, and then it became more and more no more a form but a value, an aesthetic value, and so we come from art to aesthetics—it’s something very, very different. And as art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, it joins with the banality of reality. Because all reality becomes aesthetical, too, then it’s a total confusion between art and reality, and the result of this confusion is hyperreality. But, in this sense, there is no more radical difference between art and realism. And this is the very end of art. As form.”
Mattress-to-mattress living turns private live into public theatre, and Jasmine, after settlin in, began hovering in corners and doorways to observe her neighbors. She was particularl interested in a middle-aged couple, Caroly Tompkins and Gus Davis, who, despite long residency in New Orleans East, had what others in the shelter called “country-ass ways. After a lifetime with a volatile mother, Jasmin is skittish; Carolyn and Gus mesmerized her with their placidity. He is illiterate, with failing eyesight, and had worked as an oysterman before Katrina and its accompanying oil spills Carolyn has a mellow laugh and, in Jasmine’ estimation, a woeful fashion sense: she wore faded house dress, pink flip-flops, and a blac polyester do-rag every day. The couple’s great interest was their sons, aged one and almost three, whom Carolyn rocked for hours in donated chair to which someone had affixed stickers that said “Wassup?
trailer group
Q: Can anyone tell me the name of the 60s or 70s post-rock group that recorded "Japanese Sandman?" This track of their recording contained the spoken message, "Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for l957 and..."
A: 'Im afraid I've found several music groups that have a song of that title. The main one being a Swing Jazz guy named Freddy Gardner and an individual named Djargo Rhinehardt. However these musicians are all in Jazz of some kind.
Although I wonder if you mean the group The Masked Marauders who did a song called I am the Japanese Sandman.
"Sherman set the Wayback Machine" is of course a reference to Mr. Peabody and his pet human Sherman from The Rocky and Bullwinkle show. (You never know, some people may miss the reference)
nola photo link farm
thanks mark
wtc in the noose
something of a shanty town quality to the port authority's plan for a shopping area at the foot of the freedom tower. no architect credited. is it me or is this cruddy looking and not appearing to belong to any master plan.
The Delta Blues’ deepest roots lay in the music of Africa. The music made its way to North America through the culture of the 15 to 20 million slaves brought during the 300 years of the slave trade. The majority of the slaves entering the Mississippi Delta were from West African tribes: Bantu, Yoruba, Ewe, and Akan. The music of these people is different, but do have recurring themes in all of them. The music is participative in call and response, drenched in oral history and tradition, and rhythmic pitch-tone fluctuations. While the vocal theme and methodology is primarily West African, the majority of the instrumentation has its beginnings in the savanna and Sahel zones of the Western Sudan. The main instrument of the West African coastal tribes was the drum, but the use of drums was outlawed during the early days of North American slavery, so the adaptation of savanna-derived string instruments came into prominence. The instruments were easily adaptable to English and Scot folk music, since all three relied on stringed instruments. These instruments were mainly two-string bowed and plucked lutes, griots, bania/halam, beta, and earth bow. Melodic lines are plucked by finger with these, in varying speeds and tone, to simulate the accompanying story being sung or chanted. The instruments crafted from local wood, and the string made from the gut of animals. This allowed for the relatively easy translation of instrumentation into early slave life. String instruments, at least of a certain type, were easy to make from local materials.
The tone and timbre of African music also reflects a great influence on the early blues. These aspects of the music centered on the playing style and accompaniment articles. Flattened notes and fluctuated tone, played to an upward drive in accordance with the drum rhythms, sound strikingly similar to pentatonic and heptatonic scales.
wildwood nj - appearing in a preservation magazines story. recently saw a good documentary on 13 titled "wildwood days." wildwood benefited from proximity to philly doo wop and then dick clarks bandstand rock and roll scene. in the summers it all moved to the shore with little beach-side rock palaces where major acts of the day performed a couple of hits in big review fashion. now they are knocking down the googie motels that remain.
heres a golden nugget / from this wildwood thread at lotta livin'
Few people in Congress are openly threatening to block money for reconstruction. More typical are sotto voce mumblings about whether federal money will be squandered through incompetence or graft by Louisiana officials. And some lawmakers have openly wondered whether each neighborhood in New Orleans needs to be rebuilt and protected with expensive floodwalls.
He is not romantic about human nature, however. When he talks about progress, he is careful to separate technological advance from, say, "ethics", which he says, smiling wryly, show no signs of improving. He was not surprised by the riots in the suburbs of Paris and he relates them to a misconception politicians have about the function of cities and their peripheries, which he believes have been vilely neglected by the planning authorities.renzo piano
After Paris, what can be done to improve the suburbs? This, he says, is the key question. "The big topic of today, and of the next 20 years, will be peripheries. How you can transform peripheries into a town. What is happening today in Paris is happening everywhere. It is mad, mad, and the insensitivity of people and politicians . . . They create ghettos. In Paris it is particularly bad. Now people are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries into cities. The peripheries are the cities that will be. Or not. Or will never be."
nyc gets its architectural act together
latest batch of emailed digital photos from jim louis in new orleans's 4th ward
(pics)this rumor was floating around the last couple of days but i waited for confirmation. i remember him from the 73-74 era band tuff darts which co-starred bobby (pre robert) gordon. a maxes KC band (which is to say pre cbgbs) that ushered in the neo-rockabilly phenom / any way he played guitar the way i liked to hear it. more proof that R and R isnt over when you turn 30 as some have put forward. he rocked till he died at age 76. rip.
Rock legend Link Wray dead to 76
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) – Guitar player Link Wray, who invented the power chord, the major modus operandi of modern rock guitarists, has died. He was 76.
A native of Dunn, North Carolina, Wray’s style is considered the blueprint for heavy metal and punk music. Wray’s is best known for his 1958 instrumental Rumble, 1959s “Rawhide” and 1963’s “Jack the Ripper.” His music has appeared in movies like “Pulp Fiction,” “Independence Day” and “Desperado.” His style is said to have inspired many other rock musicians, including Pete Townsend of the Who, but also David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Steve Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen have been quoted as saying that Wray and Rumble inspired them to become musicians. “He is the king; if it hadn’t been for Link Wray and ‘Rumble,’ I would have never picked up a guitar,” Townsend wrote on one of Wray’s albums. Neil Young once said: “If I could go back in time and see any band, it would be Link Wray and the Raymen.” The date of Wray’s death was not known. He lived in Copenhagen. Wray is survived by his wife and son.
from here
and you know record brother is on this with mp3s (including an oh so sweet "begin the beguine" sounding very much like a funeral march)
These came from an estate in Virginia where the man was a former police accident and crime scene photographer in the 1950s. He did not use a large fancy press camera; this was a rural area which did not have the benefit of the best equipment. The smaller pictures (3 1/2 x 3 1/2) appear to have been taken by a Brownie-type camera, The larger ones were taken by an early Polaroid. There are 32 in all, which show a variety of wrecks. There is body in a road and another of a person under a tree being covered up next to damaged cars. Several photos show policemen. There is nothing written on the backs. Photo quality is still sharp and clear. Interstesting, historical look at auto hazards in the pre-seat belt days.
nyc gridlock allert days:
-Friday, Nov. 18
-Wednesday, Nov. 23
-Thursday, Nov. 30
-Friday, Dec. 9
-Thursday, Dec. 15
-Friday, Dec. 16
-Wednesday, Dec. 21
-Thursday, Dec. 22
-Friday, Dec. 23