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Join us for a romp through the kaleidoscopic sonic playground of John Cage, as WNYC celebrates the 95th birthday anniversary of this patriarch of American contemporary music with hours of radio you won't hear anywhere else.
24:33 features rare audio drawn from the WNYC archives over the past 40 + years, including live performances and interviews with Cage — as well as Cage tributes, commentary, and performances by some of the most influential musicians of our time. We also hear recent recollections from artists such as choreographer Merce Cunningham, pianist Margaret Leng Tan, and singer Joan LaBarbara, as well as Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk.
In addition to 24:33 on our HD and internet channel WNYC2, Evening Music features ten days of special Cage-related programming, beginning August 27th and heard every evening at 7PM on WNYC-FM.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
One of many wrenching scenes in Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke
is a man bringing his mother back to the horrible ruin of her home. The man is Terence Blanchard, a trumpeter and band leader. He also wrote the music for Spike Lee’s film. Blanchard has just come out with a new album that expands on that score, and he talked to us about his experiences writing about Katrina.
scroll baby scroll
modernist coffee table / bucks co barn sale find
more big pink
justins got some nice house porn going on over at materialicio.us
Last week, floodwaters reached the front steps of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in the second "hundred-year" flood of Illinois' Fox River since 1996.
contractors spacepen
via vz
WILLIAM AIKEN WALKER / rural southern cabin paintings
President Bush commemorated Hurricane Katrina's devastating blow Wednesday with a somber moment of silence. Across town, in a symbol of a federal-city divide that persists two years after the killer storm, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin marked the levee-breach moment with bell-ringing.
"We're still paying attention. We understand," Bush said in remarks afterward.
The president and his wife, Laura, were spending Wednesday's anniversary in New Orleans and Bay St. Louis, Miss., determined to celebrate those he said have "dedicated their lives to the renewal" of the region. But with New Orleans and the Gulf Coast far from their former selves after two years, some here think it's the president's dedication that should be in the spotlight.
The front page of The Times-Picayune advertised a scathing editorial above the masthead: "Treat us fairly, Mr. President." It chided the Bush administration for giving Republican-dominated Mississippi a share of federal money disproportionate to the lesser impact the storm had there than in largely Democratic Louisiana. "We ought to get no less help from our govenrment than any other vicitims of this diaster," it said.
rip hilly kristal
On the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, anger over the stalled rebuilding was palpable Wednesday throughout the city where the mourning for the dead and feeling of loss doesn't seem to subside.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall south of New Orleans at 6:10 a.m. Aug. 29, 2005, as a strong Category 3 hurricane that flooded 80 percent of the city and killed more than 1,600 people in Louisiana and Mississippi. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
On Wednesday, protesters planned to march from the obliterated Lower 9th Ward to Congo Square, where slaves were once allowed to celebrate their culture. Accompanied by brass bands, they will again try to spread their message that the government has failed to help people return.
"People are angry and they want to send a message to politicians that they want them to do more and do it faster," said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, a Baptist pastor and community activist. "Nobody's going to be partying."
In the two years since Hurricane Katrina, what has the rebuilding effort produced? No grand designs. No inspired vision for the future of New Orleans. There have been only a handful of earnest, grass-roots proposals to preserve what’s left of the historic fabric.
Amid this atmosphere of malaise, two recently announced projects for downtown New Orleans stand out as the first truly creative attempts to foster the city’s resurrection. The first, an extravagant proposal for a new New Orleans National Jazz Center and park by Morphosis, is the most significant work of architecture proposed in the city since the Superdome. The second, a six-mile-long park and mixed-use development along the Mississippi, designed by TEN Arquitectos, Hargreaves Associates and Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, would undo decades of misguided building on the riverfront.
la vida de vagabundos americanos
via jzoller
the james rose center
about jr
The word "will" comes up constantly in the Lower Ninth Ward now; We Will Rebuild is spray-painted onto empty houses; "it will happen," one organizer told me. Will itself may achieve the ambitious objective of bringing this destroyed neighborhood back to life, and for many New Orleanians a ferocious determination seems the only alternative to being overwhelmed and becalmed. But the fate of the neighborhood is still up in the air, from the question of whether enough people can and will make it back to the nagging questions of how viable a city and an ecology they will be part of. The majority of houses in this isolated neighborhood are still empty, though about a tenth of the residents are back, some already living in rehabilitated houses, some camped in stark white FEMA trailers outside, some living elsewhere while getting their houses ready. If you measured the Lower Ninth Ward by will, solidarity and dedication, from both residents and far-flung volunteers and nonprofits, it would be among the best neighborhoods in the United States. If you measured it by infrastructure and probabilities, it looks pretty grim. There are more devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard Parish, let alone Mississippi and the Delta, but the Lower Ninth got hit hard by Katrina. Its uncertain fate has come to be an indicator for the future of New Orleans and the fate of its African-American majority.
the uncola
It is empty of both normal matter - such as galaxies and stars - and the mysterious "dark matter" that cannot be seen directly with telescopes.via vz
The "hole" is located in the direction of the Eridanus constellation and has been identified in data from a survey of the sky made at radio wavelengths.
The discovery will be reported in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
Previous sky surveys that have traced the large-scale structure of the nearby Universe have long shown, for example, how the clustering of galaxies is strung into vast filaments and sheets that are separated by great gaps.
But the void discovered by a University of Minnesota team is about 1,000 times the volume of what would be expected in typical cosmic gaps.
NO house in France better reflects the magical promise of 20th-century architecture than the Maison de Verre. Tucked behind the solemn porte-cochere of a traditional French residence on Rue Saint-Guillaume, a quiet street in a wealthy Left Bank neighborhood, the 1932 house designed by Pierre Chareau challenges our assumptions about the nature of Modernism. For architects it represents the road not taken: a lyrical machine whose theatricality is the antithesis of the dry functionalist aesthetic that reigned through much of the 20th century.
Its status as a cult object was enhanced by the house’s relative inaccessibility. For decades it was seen only by a handful of scholars and by patients of a gynecologist whose offices took up the first floor. Later it was mostly used as occasional guest quarters for friends of the doctor’s family, who had long since settled into a traditional 18th-century apartment across the courtyard.
Wright’s low-slung, earth-hugging houses, spread out horizontally, were usually covered by wide, overhanging roofs. The focus inside was a generous living area in a large masonry core that encompassed a large fireplace wall and a small kitchen. A wing of bedrooms and baths was laid out along an extended axis.
To open up interior space and provide light, Wright outlawed most interior partitions, created built-ins and multitasking furniture, put in broad bands of glass windows that functioned as exterior walls rather than as mere apertures, developed ingenious lighting fixtures and designed large areas of carpeting patterned to resonate with the house’s floor plan. In his 1932 autobiography, he wrote, “The most desirable work of art in modern times is a beautiful living room, or let’s say, a beautiful room to live in.”
For one of his most famous houses, designed for Frederick Robie of Chicago in 1908, he created a large, open living area (shown in a photograph) in which the dining room is reduced to a table surrounded by a set of high-backed chairs. The chairs themselves created an enclosure that gave diners a sense of intimacy within the larger surroundings. A storage unit with vertical and horizontal cabinets was built into a nearby wall, the whole replacing space-hogging conventional furniture.
Australian Convict photos from the 20's
via jzoller