Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
oh yeah, its in french.
Over 36 hours worth of lectures by Roland Barthes (1915-1980). The audio material available here represents the complete lectures given by Barthes during his first 2 years' teaching at the Collège de France in 1977 and 1978, and also his inaugural lecture about the question of power (and the way it is inscribed in the core of the language). [MP3s are in French] (via UbuWeb)
The initial question that he asks to himself (: « How to find the right distance between me and my neighbour in order that an acceptable social living may be possible for all of us ? ») finds a direct answer in Barthes' following proposal : the idiorhythmy as a way (as a fantasy) of living, i.e. a system in which everyone should be able to find, impose and preserve their own rhythm of life.
These lectures about living in community seem strangely refer to themes that Michel Foucault had previously dealt with. According to Barthes, power is precisely what forbids any idiorythmy because it imposes strict rhythms to individuals. The design of the paragon of an idiorhythmic way of living should be that of an anchorite or an ascetic stylite secluded on the top of his column (cf. Buñuel's Simon Of The Desert) ; on the other hand, the total rejection of idiorythmy is what will produce such communities as convents, monasteries or phalansteries (and we should also add two other types of communities that proscribe the possibility of idiorythmy to individuals, two main institutions in Foucault's works : psychiatric hospitals and prisons).
During his 1977's lectures, Barthes will apply himself to clear a path to a living-together (probably utopian), towards this fantasy of society he suggests : a society that would allow everyone to live according to his own rhythm inside the community but without being based on an extreme solitude for each individual (hard to reach, except in the case of the authentic extatic mysticism and in the case of a deep - pathological - feeling of dereliction), a society that wouldn't be based on the extreme alienation of individiuals by a power (whatever its forms) fixing strict rhythms.
via kenny g wfmu beware the blog
Other members of the committees said the executive branch communications were essential because it had become apparent that one of the most significant failures was the apparent lack of complete engagement by the White House and the federal government in the days immediately before and after the storm.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The White House was told in the hours before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans that the city would probably soon be inundated with floodwater, forcing the long-term relocation of hundreds of thousands of people, documents to be released Tuesday by Senate investigators show.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
nyt complete coverage storm and crisis
In the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, HBN launched GreenRelief to initiate and assist efforts that emphasize environmental and social justice when rebuilding communities and restoring the natural environment. HBN investigator Jim Vallette has traveled to the Gulf States region repeatedly to assess the opportunities and barriers affecting green rebuilding plans. This is the first of his occasional reports. More of Jim's work can be found at http://www.greenrelief.org.
underlined artifice - One point of style in her photographs is that she leaves the black edges of the negative visible on the print. This draws awareness that the image is a work of art and it underlines the artifice of the photograph as opposed to it being a window on the world.
real estate pornado alert:
Lockhart Steele
Wednesday, January 25th, 3pm - 6pm
on Intelligent Design with Kenny G
Join Kenny G and DJ Monica on Wednesday, January 25th between 5 and 6pm for an hour of red-hot real estate porn as they welcome guest Lockhart Steele, proprietor of New York City's hottest real estate blog curbed.com. Venturing into topics never-before heard on WFMU's airwaves, Steele will be slinging the same sort of mix of savvy gossip and speculative irony that makes curbed.com tick. We'll be taking calls from listeners, either drooling with envy or frothing with anger about the one subject that everyone in the tri-state area, one way or another, is forced to deal with.
Several years ago, I built my first homemade digital camera. The idea was simple - I would take an ordinary flatbed scanner, and use it in place of photo paper with a large format camera.
My first scanner camera was made from lots of duct tape, a cardboard box, and the cheapest flatbed scanner that I could find. I expected this to be a quick little art project, one that would take a week or two at the most. But when I got my first homemade digital camera to work, I noticed that some wonderful things were beginning to happen.
Les mésarchitectures de Didier Fiuza Faustino
La Ville oblique de Claude Parent
via frenchy pilou from pushpullbar
PushPullBar architecture + design forum
BLDG
BLOG
Proclaiming that art is null was not an aesthetic judgment on his part, but an anthropological problem. It was a polemic gesture towards culture as a whole, which now is simultaneously nothing and everything, being at once elitist and crassly materialistic, repetitive, ingenious, pretentious and inflated beyond human recognition. For Baudrillard art has nothing to do with art as it is usually understood. It remains a yet unresolved issue for post-humans to deal with – if anyone in the far-away future still cares organizing another exciting panel on the future of art.
Art doesn’t come from a natural impulse, but from calculated artifice (at the dawn of modernism, Baudelaire already figured this out). So it is always possible to question its status, and even its existence. We have grown so accustomed to take art with a sense of awe that we cannot look at it anymore with dispassionate eyes, let alone question its legitimacy. This is what Baudrillard had in mind, and few people realized it at the time. First one has to nullify art in order to look at it for what it is. And this is precisely what Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol respectively did. By now art may well have outgrown this function, although everyone keeps acting as if it still mattered. Actually nothing proves that it was meant to persevere, or would persist in the forms it has given itself, except by some kind of tacit agreement on everybody’s part. Baudrillard called it a “conspiracy,” but he might as well have called Disneyland “the Conspiracy of Reality.” And none of it, of course, was real, except as a conspiracy. Conspiracy too is calculated artifice. Maybe the art world is an art onto itself, possibly the only one left. Waiting to be given its final form by someone like Baudrillard. Capital, the ultimate art. We all are artists on this account.
Art is no different anymore from anything else. This doesn’t prevent it from growing exponentially. The “end of art,” so often trumpeted, never happened. It was replaced instead by unrestrained proliferation and cultural overproduction. Never has art been more successful than it is today – but is it still art? Like material goods, art is endlessly recycling itself to meet the demands of the market. Worse yet: the less pertinent art has become as art, the louder it keeps claiming its “exceptionalism.” Instead of bravely acknowledging its own obsolescence and questioning its own status, it is basking in its own self-importance. The only legitimate reason art would have to exist nowadays would be to reinvent itself as art. But this may be asking too much. It may not be capable of doing that, because it has been doing everything it could to prove it still is art. In that sense Baudrillard may well be one of the last people who really cares about art.
from : lotringers introduction to baudrillards conspiricy of art
Ho-Tah-Moie or Roaring Thunder (john stink)
Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay. Nevers, France (1966) Paul Virilio and Claude Parent
Foreword
by Paul Virilio
"Contemporary civilization differs in one particularly distinctive feature from those which preceded it: speed. The change has come about within a generation," noted the historian Marc Bloch, writing in the nineteen-thirties. This situation brings in its wake a second feature: the accident. The progressive spread of catastrophic events do not just affect current reality, but produce anxiety and anguish for coming generations. Daily life is becoming a kaleidoscope of incidents and accidents, catastrophes and cataclysms, in which we are endlessly running up against the unexpected, which occurs out of the blue, so to speak. In a shattered mirror, we must then learn to discern what is impending more and more often-but above all more and more quickly, those events coming upon us inopportunely, if not indeed simultaneously. Faced with an accelerated temporality which affects mores and Art as much as it does international politics, there is one particularly urgent necessity: to expose and to exhibit the Time accident.
paul virilio the accident of art
The fight ended without fanfare. For 123 of the most heavily damaged structures, almost all in the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans officials have agreed to give seven to 10 days' notice before bulldozing. The city will publish an advertisement over three days in The Times-Picayune listing the addresses of the affected properties, will post a warning on the its Web site and will try to contact the owners by mail.
The warning will specify that officials intend to "demolish or haul away" the property. Owners have a right to challenge the demolitions in the seven- to 10-day window.
For 1,900 houses less seriously damaged, but still considered in imminent danger of collapse, the city will give 30 days' notice.
cedar creek treehouse
vw 1967 deluxe model so-44 campmobile
via zoller
portland oregon socialites 1955
series of 16 newly acquired images documenting an initiation into king neptunes court (a naval equator crossing ritual). 11 portrait format and 5 landscape format. the originals should work nicely into a 4 x 4 vertical grid.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation President Richard Moe responded to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s Bring Back New Orleans Commission’s recently unveiled proposal that would give neighborhoods in the city’s low-lying areas from four months to one year to prove that they should not be bulldozed.
[The following includes excerpts from a letter Moe sent to Mayor Nagin last night in response to the commission’s recommendation. To read the entire letter click here (pdf).]
“At the very least, I would urge that building permits be allowed in the city's nineteen National Register Historic Districts, which contain 38,000 historic structures. We have concluded that every single one of these historic districts can and should be rebuilt, and that the overwhelming majority of damaged structures within their boundaries can be repaired. These are the Creole cottages, shotgun houses and historic bungalows that constitute the heart and soul of New Orleans. These are the neighborhoods most important to the identity of New Orleans, and they must be allowed to lead the city's neighborhood recovery effort.”
James Zadroga spent 16 hours a day toiling in the World Trade Center ruins for a month, breathing in debris-choked air. Timothy Keller said he coughed up bits of gravel from his lungs after the towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. Felix Hernandez spent days at the site helping to search for victims.
All three men died in the last seven months of what their families and colleagues say are persistent respiratory illnesses directly caused by their work at ground zero.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The New York Daily News has learned that an additional 22 men, mostly in their 30s and 40s, have died from causes their families say were accelerated by the toxic mix of chemicals that lodged in their bodies as they searched for survivors or participated in the cleanup after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Zadroga was far from alone, of course, at Ground Zero. Thousands of others, from across the city and across the country, had arrived at the smouldering crevice in Lower Manhattan to do the same, in what was a long, long clean-up and debris-trucking process. How many of them are ailing now? How many of them might die because of illnesses attributable to the contaminants they inhaled, or the particles absorbed into their skin, at a time when many frantic responders weren't even wearing proper protective gear or respiratory apparatus?
[....]
One survey, of 1,138 responders, from the period of July to December 2002, showed 60 per cent reported lower airway breathing problems and 74 per cent reported upper airway breathing problems.
Federal employees were told not to participate in the Mount Sinai program, that a separate monitoring agency would be established for them. But such an agency appeared and disappeared with fewer than 600 people seen, according to one of the 9/11 civilian watchdog groups.
In the 10 days immediately after 9/11, the Environmental Protection Agency put out five press releases reassuring the public that air and soil samples indicated no heightened levels of cancer-causing agents in the air or soil anywhere beyond the immediate Ground Zero area. Some EPA officials have since admitted those assurances were unfounded and may have been influenced by political pressure. Certainly the Sierra Club has alleged a cover-up of what was clearly an acute environmental disaster, even though the environment was hardly foremost in people's minds at the time, as relatives searched for loved ones and the White House planned a military response. What became quickly known as the "WTC cough" was prevalent among emergency responders. A later study undertaken by a private environmental firm — at the behest of a company contracted to perform some of the cleanup — found more alarming developments, with positive tests for significant asbestos levels. That firm suggested the sheer force of the tower explosions shattered asbestos into fibres so small they evaded the EPA's ordinary testing methods.
Ground Zero inhalation tests of ambient air showed WTC dust consisted predominantly (95 per cent) of coarse particles and pulverized cement, with glass fibres, asbestos, lead, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polychlorinated furans and dioxins.
"Freedom For The Stallion" (Allen Toussaint) Allen Toussaint, live, 4/9/1976
(LISTEN) "As I mentioned earlier, Allen Toussaint turns 68 this Saturday, the 14th; and I hope he has a great day and fine new year. After having lost his home when the levee broke, he needs them. I’ve picked this live performance of one of his songs for the weekend, since it ties in with the spirit of Martin Luther King Day, as well."
-from home of the groove
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
more from home of the groove : "Don't Bring Me Down" (Allen Toussaint) Labelle, from Nightbirds, Epic, 1974 - and - A Toussaint Two-fer
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Every now and then I like to point you to other posts of New Olreans music I find. Hey, I can't post everything, as you may have noticed. Our hard bloggin' friend, AK, over at Soul Shower has two nice posts up now with tracks by Huey Smith and the Clowns, featuring Gerri Hall, and and by the Barons, about as obscure a New Orleans vocal group as you could want. Check 'em while they're hot. By the way, I enourage all mp3 bloggers to post more New Orleans music. The city needs the attention. The tunes need to be heard. And I need less pressure! Peace.
-from home of the groove