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hokum : an anthology of african-american humor
In a rare display of unanimity that cuts across partisan and geographic lines, lawmakers in virtually every statehouse across the country are advancing bills and constitutional amendments to limit use of the government's power of eminent domain to seize private property for economic development purposes.
The measures are in direct response to the United States Supreme Court's 5-to-4 decision last June in a landmark property rights case from Connecticut, upholding the authority of the City of New London to condemn homes in an aging neighborhood to make way for a private development of offices, condominiums and a hotel. It was a decision that one justice, who had written for the majority, later all but apologized for.
If all American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn, all American surf culture comes from Gidget, the ostensible diary of Kathy Kohner, a teensy, gutsy teenage girl who crashed the all-male scene at Malibu Beach north of L.A. in 1957 and earned, from Moondoggie and others, the nickname Gidget, which meant "Girl Midget." Her father, the German immigrant screenwriter Frederick Kohner, fascinated by the beach-shack counterculture, interviewed his perky daughter at length, eavesdropped with permission on her phone calls, fictionalized her adventures, and batted out this influential bestseller. He nailed a tiny subculture's new form of speech ("If you want to know what goes on in Loveville ... Dig Number One: being gone on a boy is more important than having a boy gone on you.") and made it a pop-culture staple. Newly reissued with the real Gidget's picture on the cover (as on the original hardback), the book is very slim (appropriately enough) and historically beguiling. You'll like her--you'll really like her! --Tim Appelothat first sentence contains double overstatements but you can see where he is going with it. gidget was a significant pop culture reference point. The real world moondoggie turns out to be west coast abstractionist bill jensen. (who is not moondog. whom some of us may remember as a ubiquitous viking garbed busker in midtown manhattan in the 1970's.)
It took a dozen years and two hundred and seventy-five million dollars to renovate the villa and surround it with a series of modernist buildings, including an entry pavilion, an amphitheatre, a parking garage, a café, an auditorium, an education center, and a shop. The project’s architects are Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, of Boston, rigorous modernists who have a love of classicism and believe that an architect best respects history not by imitating it but by teasing its spirit into new forms. Machado and Silvetti are about as far as you can get from Norman Neuerburg, who designed the original villa, and it seemed an odd match: there is nothing overtly charming about Machado and Silvetti’s work, while Neuerburg’s design was a vast, sprawling exercise in cuteness.
The campus that Machado and Silvetti have created is a bracing collage of old and new, and the villa has been nearly magically transformed. The task was surely made easier by the fact that the French furniture and Old Master paintings are gone from the villa, and its new contents have a genuine connection to ancient Rome. (In fact, some items in the collection may belong to Rome; the Getty has been accused of acquiring a significant number of looted artifacts.) But it takes more than hauling away some gilded frames to make a ponderous building into a gracious one. Instead of slavishly replicating Roman architecture (although various touches, such as new floors of bronze, mosaic, and marble, reveal a high level of scholarship), Machado and Silvetti have acknowledged the past without imitating it. They have boldly reorganized the villa, creating more logical routes through it and adding fifty-eight windows and three skylights, to bring natural light into the galleries. One of the best things in the villa now is a new main stair, of bronze, glass, and hand-carved Spanish stone; a meticulous modernist composition, it is broad, sumptuous, and serene, and a crisp counterpoint to the classical-looking environment around it. The effect is playful and knowing: in Italy, contemporary alterations to ancient Roman structures are often made in such a bluntly modern style, to make clear which elements are authentically old. Here, of course, the “original” details date from 1974.
rustic cabin rentals in nockamixon state park
In recent years architects around the world have stopped using straight lines. If this trend continues at its current rate, a child drawing a house 10 years from now will not sketch a square building with a straight floor and a shingled roof, but rather one more reminiscent of a soap bubble.
The development of computer software programs used for architectural planning and for improving building technologies has produced a new architectural language - a language that creates buildings with amorphous forms known in the professional jargon as skins.
House Republicans plan to issue a blistering report on Wednesday that says the Bush administration delayed the evacuation of thousands of New Orleans residents by failing to act quickly on early reports that the levees had broken during Hurricane Katrina.
A draft of the report, to be issued by an 11-member, all-Republican committee, says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached, even though the president and other top administration officials earlier said that they had learned of the breach the next day.
That delay was significant, the report says, rejecting the defense given by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security that the time it took to recognize the breach did not significantly affect the response.
"If the levees breached and flooded a large portion of the city, then the flooded city would have to be completely evacuated," the draft report says. "Any delay in confirming the breaches would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city." It adds that the White House itself discounted damage reports that later proved true.
It's about the shoes, says Professor Ed Galea, in New York this week from the University of Greenwich to interview people who made it out of the twin towers on 9-11. All those women's high-heels that people saw littering the stairwells were but a colorful detail in most retellings of the day. For Galea, however, the shoes scream danger—and a need for new thinking about how to protect people in high-rises.
Galea and a band of other behavioral psychologists are here, as they will be for 36 weeks in the next year, attempting to interview 2,000 survivors from World Trade Center 1 and 2 to learn the details of their trips to safety (when they started to evacuate and why, whether they traveled in groups, how large the crowds were on the stairs, and so on) in hopes of influencing building codes to make high rises safer places to work, live, and—in an emergency—leave.
A veteran of disaster studies, Galea tells the Voice that the interviews so far appear to contradict many prevailing assumptions about how people evacuate buildings—the assumptions underlying current regulations governing how those buildings are built. For example, engineers around the world think most people start to evacuate in an emergency about two minutes after they learn of the incident. In the towers, however, folks in some cases lingered at their desks or the windows for an hour. Simply put, if true, that changes everything, from the volume of people the stairwells must accept to how long the fireproofing has to last.
the dialectic poetry of paul lawrence dunbar
bob not bob
from here not here
live music ~ vault radio
Bill Graham and his concert promotion company, Bill Graham Presents, produced more than 35,000 concerts all over the world. His first venue, the legendary Fillmore Auditorium, was home to many of rock's greatest performers - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Prince - and the list goes on and on.
Graham taped thousands of live performances and stored the tapes in the basement of the BGP headquarters.
These tapes and the concerts they captured lay dormant until the Bill Graham archive was acquired by Wolfgang's Vault (Bill Graham's given first name was Wolfgang) in 2003.
Vault Radio is now playing selected tracks from these concerts in an FM-quality, 128K digital radio stream. Songs will be added to and removed from the radio show on a regular basis. We will be broadcasting unaltered live performance music from many of the greatest bands of the last 40 years. The music you hear on Vault Radio has not been sweetened or polished. You'll be listening to what the band played that night - nothing more, nothing less.
streaming for free now w/ plans to sell downloads later this year.
rat rod report
1968 convertible corvette
White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.
But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have found.
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.
On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin is available online for free
FREE THE PEOPLE!
pinks
Bulldozers may start demolishing flood-damaged houses in New Orleans as soon as this month, but the city won't be razing as many as it planned to in December.This is a most promising development.
Preservationists are taking a closer look at a list of red-tagged buildings in New Orleans that the city says are in immediate danger of collapse.
Last month, the city's historic landmarks commission asked the National Trust's New Orleans Field Office and the Preservation Resource Center to inspect the 1,957 houses on a list that was made public last month after a lawsuit settlement. Most of the damaged houses are located in the Ninth Ward.
In the last three weeks, volunteers—architectural historians and other qualified inspectors—have identified about 100 that they say should not be demolished. The city's list of "red-rated" buildings was 5,500, and the recently published list was the "worst of the worst," says Walter Gallas, director of the New Orleans Field Office.
"We looked at properties that were in National Register and local historic districts that were in this initial list," Gallas says. "We started from this list of 5,500, but that number has been whittled down."
The Trust plans to act as a consultant with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the Section 106 review process, which is required before a federal agency can raze a National Register-listed historic resource.
"When requests for demolition come down, the Trust and Preservation Resource Center will be consulted," Gallas says. "It's just one part of the work we're doing."
To settle a lawsuit, the city agreed on Jan. 17 to notify owners of houses it wants to demolish in 30 days—in a letter, in an ad in the Times-Picayune, and on the newspaper's Web site. Homeowners will also be able to challenge the city's assessment. The lawsuit was filed over 120 Ninth Ward houses that were obstructing sidewalks and roads.
The city last month began notifying homeowners of impending demolitions, so according to the agreement, it can demolish those structures this month.
being jane jacobs via blowhard
more on JJ via robert silvey
frozen smoke
Brookings Findings
Days Since Katrina Made Landfall: 156
Now over five months since Katrina made landfall, New Orleans is home to over 130,000 people, including a much larger than expected population of college students. But, the city lacks enough essential services to support all of these returning residents, and the area continues to hemorrhage workers. What key trends were available this month for the states suggest little progress in both Louisiana and Mississippi.
[...]
The slow pace of recovery on fundamentals strongly suggests that the city and state will be unable to restore essential services on their own, and require direct federal assistance to do so. Meanwhile, the well being of the nearly 750,000 households that remain displaced by Katrina is essentially not known. With New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mississippi still facing massive economic and infrastructural challenges, it is likely that many of these households will need federal assistance for many months to come.
Why wireless Internet in Louisiana and New Orleans? Why is it so important for the citizens around the state?
Bayoubuzz asked the Chief Technology Officer, Greg Meffert to explain the needs of New Orleans and why it is so important to the State of Louisiana. Currently, the City of New Orleans is backing legislation that is on the Governor’s call to allow cities build or deploy wireless Internet systems for its citizens.
As we discovered during the very last hurricane season, there was a complete and total communications breakdown in areas throughout Louisiana. Each parish would be allowed to opt-in as to whether it wants to make wireless Internet available to its citizens.