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In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it was easy to conclude that New Orleans--at least the New Orleans of popular imagination--had ceased to exist. But there have always been two New Orleanses: the picture-postcard version, catering to tourists; and the strange, eccentric, vibrant, and troubled living city. As the water receded and residents slowly made their way back into the ravaged neighborhoods, it became clear that the postcard had largely survived but that day-to-day New Orleans faced a much more uncertain future.links to metropolis mag w/ pictures
The battle for the Crescent City--one that is almost certain since billions of federal dollars are committed to disaster relief--will ultimately be a test of whether the city can rebuild on a massive, unprecedented scale and still retain its essential character.
In the days following the disaster I spoke to four designers from the region about the challenges and opportunities ahead. All of them were well versed in the political and social vagaries of the city--its problems prior to Katrina and its prospects now--but none had succumbed to cynicism or despair. Obviously it was much too early in the game, and they love the city too much to go there yet.
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Participants
Lake Douglas, landscape historian and coauthor of Gardens of New Orleans
R. Allen Eskew, founding principal of architecture and urban-design firm Eskew + Dumez + Ripple
Reed Kroloff, dean of Tulane University's School of Architecture and former editor in chief of Architecture magazine
Elizabeth Mossop, director of the School of Landscape Architecture, Louisiana State University, and principal of Spackman + Mossop Landscape Architects
Secretary of Housing Alfonso Jackson, meanwhile, seems to be working to fulfill his notorious prediction that New Orleans is “not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.” Public-housing and Section 8 residents recently protested that “the agencies in charge of these housing complexes [including HUD] are using allegations of storm damage to these complexes as a pretext for expelling working-class African-Americans, in a very blatant attempt to co-opt our homes and sell them to developers to build high-priced housing.”
Minority homeowners also face relentless pressures not to return. Insurance compensation, for example, is typically too small to allow homeowners in the eastern wards of New Orleans to rebuild if and when authorities re-open their neighborhoods.
Similarly, the Small Business Administration—so efficient in recapitalizing the San Fernando Valley in the aftermath of the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake—has so far dispensed only a few million dollars despite increasingly desperate pleas from tens of thousands of homeowners and small business people facing imminent foreclosure or bankruptcy.
As a result, not just the Black working class, but also the Black professional and business middle classes are now facing economic extinction while Washington dawdles. Tens of thousands of blue-collar white, Asian and Latino residents of afflicted Gulf communities also face de facto expulsion from the region, but only the removal of African-Americans is actually being advocated as policy.
Since Katrina made landfall, conservatives—beginning with Rep. Richard Baker’s infamous comments about God having “finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans”—have openly gloated over the possibilities for remaking New Orleans in a GOP image. (Medically, this might be considered akin to a mass outbreak of Tourette Syndrome, whose official symptoms include “the overwhelming urge to use a racial epithet.”)
The idea that New Urbanists such as Duany and Calthorpe may be helping to write plans for the new Gulf Coast has horrified many architects and left-leaning cultural critics — revealing, in the process, quite a bit about the ambitions and anxieties that mark contemporary architectural practice in this country.
"Among the New Urbanists, Calthorpe is on the progressive and thoughtful side," says Reed Kroloff, the dean of the architecture school at Tulane University and former editor of Architecture magazine. But he termed Calthorpe's Louisiana appointment "very, very disappointing" and "a sign that the whole region has been handed over to the CNU."
The response from other architects and critics was, to put it mildly, less measured. Eric Owen Moss, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, told the Washington Post in October that New Urbanists were finding a foothold in the Gulf Coast because their agenda appeals "to a kind of anachronistic Mississippi that yearns for the good old days of the Old South as slow and balanced and breezy, and each person knew his or her own role."
Next came comments from Mike Davis, a writer who can throw gasoline on a fire with the best of them. Calling the New Urbanists an "architectural cult," he reported to readers of Mother Jones that during the Mississippi Renewal Forum, "Duany whipped up a revivalistic fervor that must have been pleasing to Barbour and other descendants of the slave masters."
The New Urbanists weren't shy about firing back. In a letter to Moss, Stefanos Polyzoides, a Pasadena architect and another CNU founder (there seem to be dozens of them), called Moss' statements "outrageous in their prejudice…. Your understanding of the CNU is superficial at best. And your comments sound remarkably hollow for a director of a school of architecture."
The Barge Buyers Handbook
Compiled by members of the Dutch Barge Association to guide you through the unique experience of buying a barge - whether for cruising, for living on or for a commercial venture. Where to start, running costs, what to look for - pitfalls as well as benefits. Essential reading if a barge figures in your dreams.
It's somehow not at all strange that the red states' most visible anti-war album comes from Dolly Parton, an artist so guileless and girlish, so above reproach, she seems incapable of wounding. Those Were the Days is a bluegrass covers record populated (mostly) by Vietnam-era protest songs hailing from the Peter, Paul and Mary School of Non-Alarming '60s Folk. But Days is occasionally more subversive than it seems.
"New Orleans is rotting and tragically fresh," said Herbie Kearney, a painter and sculptor whose studio was destroyed. "We have to come back and make art. If you don't have culture, the city will become Disneyland for condo people."
yokohama 2005 triennale of contemporary artit looks like container structures are becoming a symbol/staple of international art fairs. look for the but-hole house with large and small intestine wings.
’speybank’ by luc deleu (1944), belgium the artist has often worked with containers in creating buildings, due to his interest in mobility and infrastructure. with the arrival of multimedia society /with the transition from ‘substance’ to ‘image’ the artist has build temporary structures, unrestricted by time and physical place.
after reading jim louis's post about eating oyster po-boys i started thinking about where the oysters came from. they would have come out of the gulf of mexico just as they were prior to katrina? then i began pondering the water quality in the gulf. time line : levee breaks, floods nola. levees patched, black flood water including petroleum, lead and other heavy metals are pumped back into lake pontchartrain which runs down into the gulf of mexico which is where the oysters live.
isnt it time to retire the word whimsy? for me it always conjures radishes :
Thelma Todd : Oh, Professor, you're full of whimsy.but more to the point, i spy our friend tony's chair in this weeks sketchpad make-over.
Groucho : Can you notice it from there? I'm always that way after I eat radishes.
"You come to these FEMA centers, you sit all day," said Myrna Guity, 43, whose import business was wiped out by the storm, along with her home in New Orleans East. "You get no answers to your questions. They're evasive. You're constantly 'pending.' What are you going to be doing, 'pending' for the rest of your life? I've lost everything."
Others wondered fearfully what was on the other side of their current privation. "We're almost begging them, 'Please, bring this trailer before Christmas,' " said DeLois Kramer, 43, who said she is "sort of living out of the car" with her 7-year-old daughter, Katlyn.
Author Ken Emerson
Sunday, December 4th, 7pm - 9pm
on Bob Brainen's show 91.1 wfmu
Bob Brainen welcomes Ken Emerson, author of the brand-new book, "Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era," and previously of "Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture." We'll be discussing the seven songwriting teams Emerson chronicles: Lieber and Stoller, Pomus and Shuman, Bacharach and David, Sedaka and Greenfield, Goffin and King, Mann and Weill, and Barry and Greenwich. We'll also cover an assortment of other characters and publishing and record companies that helped the music from 1619 and 1650 Broadway flourish in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We'll be playing lots of music by these writers whose collective efforts helped create a soundtrack for several generations.
burt bacharach hal david at spectropop
653 songs (many hits)
jeff barry and ellie greenwich
brill building series the hits
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller have written some of the most spirited and enduring rock and roll songs: "Hound Dog" (originally cut by Big Mama Thornton in 1953 and covered by Elvis Presley three years later), "Love Potion No. 9" (the Clovers), "Kansas City" (Wilbert Harrison), "On Broadway" (the Drifters), "Ruby Baby" (Dion) and "Stand By Me" (Ben E. King). Their vast catalog includes virtually every major hit by the Coasters (e.g., "Searchin'," "Young Blood," "Charlie Brown," "Yakety Yak" and "Poison Ivy"). They also worked their magic on Elvis Presley, writing "Jailhouse Rock," "Treat Me Nice" and "You're So Square (Baby I Don't Care)" specifically for him. All totaled, Presley recorded more than 20 Leiber and Stoller songs.
and:
Smokey Joe's Cafe", the Robins, 1955) to rock ("Black Denim Trousers" the Cheers, 1955) without realizing that this change of venues (the funky greasy spoon of the former for the motorcycle of the latter) was about to produce a new culture and an undreamed of source of income. In fact, one of the songwriters' most successful rock vehicles was a spin-off from the Robins, the much better-remembered Coasters, who recorded their "Searchin'" b/w "Young Blood" for Atco, a subsidiary of Atlantic, in 1957, a year after Elvis's pelvis-shaking "Hound Dog". The same group scored in 1958 with the pair's "Yakety Yak", tickled by King Curtis's sax work, and in 1959 with "Love Potion No. 9 (Searchers, 1960)", "Charlie Brown", "Along Came Jones", "Poison Ivy", and "I'm a Hog For You". But a major source of Leiber and Stoller's success and power was their ability to bridge both racial barriers and musical genres. Their funny and funky contributions to the Coasters stand in contrast to their ethereal "Dance With Me" (the Drifters, 1959) and the gospely "Stand By Me" (Ben E. King, 1961). The breadth is even evident in their association with their most famous single partner, Elvis Presley, who managed to ride some of Big Mama's rollick in "Hound Dog", to choreograph Leiber and Stoller's high-spirited title tune for his "Jailhose Rock" film, to tame himself down to a genteel jump in "Treat Me Nice", and to croon passionately on "Don't".
mort shuman and doc pomus - brill building series
barry mann cynthia weil - brill building series
a m geller's grandson jake gorst's email to curbed regarding pearlroth house:
We've managed to raise enough money to move the house, but the Town of Southampton now requires that we put $25,000 in a passbook savings account so they can access it in the unlikely event that we abandon the restoration project before February 2007. Essentially they want us to pay to have it torn down if we "give up" - which is not in our vocabulary.
too clever by half
From 28 June 1965 to 31 March 1967 many American teenagers rushed home from school to watch Where the Action Is, a weekday ABC-TV program produced by Dick Clark Productions. The show aired at 3:30 p.m. central time and began with Freddy Cannon's song "Action": "Oh, baby, come on, let me take you where the action is/ . . . It's so neat to meet your baby where the action is."I was 11 when it started and 13 when it ended. i saw sonny and cher often. paul revere + raiders were regulars. it was a great summer and run home after school show though for sure. it laid the ground work in garage band appreciation. psych was still just around the time corner but that would only come from the radio. that was the end of reality youth culture on tv for a while (not counting the monkeys.) next would come don kirshner's rock concert. but that was what seamed to be much later. i was loosing interest in american band stand as soul train took on more relevance late 60's early 70's.
psychotic reaction the count five
New York Review of Books reviewed
Santiago Calatrava: Clay and Paint, Ceramics and Watercolors
an exhibition at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, New York,October 19–November 26, 2005
Santiago Calatrava: The Complete Works
by Alexander Tzonis
Rizzoli, 432 pp., $75.00
Santiago Calatrava: The Bridges
by Alexander Tzonis and Rebeca Caso Donadei
Universe, 272 pp., $29.95
Santiago Calatrava: Milwaukee Art Museum, Quadracci Pavilion
by Cheryl Kent
Rizzoli, 128 pp., $35.00
Santiago Calatrava: The Athens Olympics
by Alexander Tzonis and Rebeca Caso Donadei
Rizzoli, 176 pp., $50.00
"Draw a picture of a house," the big sister instructed the younger one, and the little girl's sketch was remarkably accurate. Her drawing was not the predictable A-frame with requisite chimney and smoke, but a squat, domed structure with striped siding. It was Alaska in the 1960s, and the girl was drawing her idea of the typical family home: a Quonset hut. This story, along with oral histories, essays, artifacts, and photographs, has been collected in Quonset: Metal Living for a Modern Age. In addition to the book, the NEH-supported project includes a Web site and an exhibition now on display at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.
During the housing crunch of the late 1940s, thousands of people across the nation converted these surplus military huts into unconventional homes, churches, and restaurants. Today, the Quonset has largely vanished from most of the American landscape--and most people's memory.
photo murals
i really dont care for this container guy kalkin