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the guardian chooses top 50 arts vids

thx lisa!
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may 1968 graffiti (happy labor day - STRIKE!)


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SI 1/3


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GD society of the spectacle


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G M-C splitting, bingo/ninths, substrait (underground dailies)


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energy and how to get it


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UbuWeb | UbuWeb Papers

Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing
Raphael Rubinstein
This paper originally appeared in March/April 1999 edition of the The American Poetry Review

Combining his quest for total objectivity with passionate bibliophilia, Walter Benjamin once dreamed of authoring an essay that would consist entirely of quotations from his sources. I'm not sure what my motivations were, but last year I wrote a poem largely composed of direct quotes from a 1979 guide to artists' videos. For the texts of other recent poems I've lifted from such sources as the table of contents of a 1950s literary journal, a review of an obscure 1960s film, an article on the Swiss pop music scene, and the intermittently legible legend on an old Mexican retablo. In some cases I simply transcribed the passage I wanted, while in others I also had to translate it. What amazes me about these acts of literary larceny is how satisfying I find the process. Even though the words are not mine, I derive from them the same kind of pleasure and pride I get from lines I have written in a more conventional manner. Why, I wonder, should it be creatively satisfying to simply transpose lines someone else has written into a text I intend to sign with my own name?

It is to answer that question that I decided to delve a little into the history of what could be called "appropriative literature." I wasn't interested so much in the 20th-century tradition of collage poetry--exemplified by "The Wasteland" and The Cantos--as in a more extreme approach in which, rather than weave obvious quotations into his or her words, the writer becomes a kind of scribe, transferring small or large passages, usually without attribution or other signals that these words were written by someone else.

The epitome of this kind of writer is, of course, Borges's splendid invention Pierre Menard, the fictional early-20th-century French poet who sets out to rewrite Cervantes's Don Quixote word for word. (In the 1980s, Borges's text was often cited in relation to so-called appropriation artists such as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince.) The idea of erasing the lines between authors was one which Borges returns to again in his short essay "The Flowers of Coleridge." There, he raises the notion previously espoused by Shelley, Emerson and Valéry that all literary works are the creations of a single eternal author (a point he tries to demonstrate by tracing a recurring idea through Coleridge, H.G. Wells and Henry James). Arguing for the essentially impersonal nature of literature, Borges reminds us that George Moore and James Joyce "incorporated in their works the pages and sentence of others" and that Oscar Wilde "used to give plots away for others to develop." More recently, a whole school of literary theory has developed ideas remarkably similar to those Borges espoused. Roland Barthes, for instance, famously defined the text as "a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original"

The following list doesn't include any Wilde-derived stories, alas, but there are plenty of instances of writers utilizing "the pages and sentences of others." I don't pretend that this is an exhaustive list -- I'm no literary scholar and didn't go far beyond what I could find on my own shelves. However, I think it does suggest the extent and vitality of the modernist tradition of textual pilfering. If nothing else, it has given me a better idea of why it seems so natural, and so creatively satisfying, to avail myself of the words of others.

(In emulation of Borges's bibliography of Pierre Menard's "visible" works, I've assigned each entry a letter.)

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gloria!


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fl1


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love letters from nola (tony fitzpatrick)


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It’s hard to think of a building that has suffered through more indignities than the Yale School of Art and Architecture. On the day of its dedication in 1963, the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner condemned the oppressive monumentality of its concrete forms. Two years later the school’s dean brutally cut up many of the interiors, which he claimed were dysfunctional. A few years after that a fire gutted what was left. By then the reputation of the building’s architect, Paul Rudolph, was in ruins.

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hotrod hoedown east coast fall event


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The plight of public schools in New Orleans have been a hot topic lately. This past Monday the School Facilities Master Plan for Orleans Parish was released; it calls for a large-scale rehabilitation of the city’s educational infrastructure. This news falls in the larger context of a shift toward privatized education which, depending on how you look at it, is either a welcome solution to an entrenched problem of low-performance (as portrayed in this week’s New York Times Magazine), or a sinister example of “disaster capitalism” (as per Naomi Klein). In either case, something important gets lost in the conversation; that is the impending threat to New Orleans’s modernist architecture.

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ct salt marsh barn

duo dickinson
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Some 34.2 million viewers watched the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing on Aug. 8, 2008. However, following the spectacular show, Western news reports charged that organizers of the event had deceived the audience by using trickery to augment the proceedings, including having a little girl lip-synch a patriotic song and representing contingents of ethnic minorities with actors. Critics claim as well that the ceremony’s spectacular fireworks show, which was conceived by Chinese art star Cai Guo-Qiang, wasn’t all it seemed to be.

The impressive fireworks display included a series of 29 giant footprints, made of white starbursts, that seemed to traverse the sky from Tiananmen Square to the Olympic Stadium. But the TV presentation of the fireworks, broadcast to the world as well as shown on the giant screens within the Olympic Stadium, included not the actual event but rather a 55-second digital film of the 29 footprints, complete with simulated camera jitter and haze, seamlessly inserted into the broadcast.

Representatives of the Beijing Games have stated that the digital trickery was necessary because the actual effect would not have been clearly visible in the prevailing atmospheric conditions, while filming it from the air would have endangered the helicopter pilot. Here, the artist himself responds to the controversy:

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The use of worn-out horseshoes as magically protective amulets -- especially hung above or next to doorways -- originated in Europe, where one can still find them nailed onto houses, barns, and stables from Italy through Germany and up into Britain and Scandinavia. Additionally, wall hangins made in the form of horseshoes are common. In the Middle-East, one finds the terra cotta blue-glazed horseshoe plaque. In Turkey small metal or blue glass horseshoes are blended with the protective all-seeing eye to form a unique apotropaic charm i call the horseshoe-and-eyes that is believed to ward off the evil eye.

There is good reason to suppose that the crescent form of the horseshoe links the symbol to pagan Moon goddesses of ancient Europe such as Artemis and Diana, and that the protection invoked is that of the goddess herself, or, more particularly, of her sacred vulva. As such, the horseshoe is related to other magically protective doorway-goddesses, such as the Irish sheela-na-gig, and to lunar protectresses such as the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is often shown standing on a crescent moon and placed within a vulval mandorla or vesica pisces.

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Whenever a structure wins the accolade of “Britain’s most hated building”, or crowds bay beside a demolition as at a public architectural execution, the victims will be brutalist buildings.

Brutalism is one of Britain’s two contributions to modern architecture. The other is “high tech”, the engineering aesthetic of metal and glass that has, in effect, become the style of the City , the emblem of modernity. Brutalism, an aesthetic based on bulky cliffs of concrete, remains locked up in its filthy, rain-stained bunker, dismissed as modernism’s idiot relative, reviled, unpopular, a manifestation of everything that went wrong with architecture. One of its finest British proponents was Rodney Gordon, who has died aged 75.

Gordon remained unknown beyond architecture circles. His brief, flashy career largely happened in the office of Owen Luder in the 1960s, meaning his name was rarely associated with a building. In that time the office designed a handful of astonishing, sculptural buildings, nearly all of which have been, or are being, destroyed. The finest was the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, a terrific essay in sci-fi concrete that was left to rot by an unsympathetic council and chain stores that would rather have been somewhere else, somewhere with a bit less . . . character. Opened in 1966, its fiercely modelled form embraced a shopping centre, a nightclub and apartments. By the 1980s its apartments had never been fully occupied because of problems with damp and malfunctioning services, the nightclub had degenerated into a shabby casino and the top of the multistorey car park had become the south coast’s most popular spot for suicides after Beachy Head. It was demolished in 2004.

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this dynamic new office space serves as a green remodeling example, having been fashioned from 90% reclaimed materials - the highest percentage in the country. the office space design integrates the Rebuilding Center's office space with the design and philosophy of its warehouses. ORANGE began by creating the stunning array of reused windows that surround the building, and has taken its problem-solving genius inside this truly amazing space.
via mb
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hello love
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ART adores a vacuum. That’s why styles, genres and mediums left for dead by one generation are often revived by subsequent ones. In the 1960s and ’70s public sculpture was contemporary art’s foremost fatality — deader than painting actually. The corpse generally took the form of corporate, pseudo-Minimalist plop art. It was ignored by the general public and despised by the art world. At the time many of the most talented emerging sculptors were making anything but sculpture. Ephemeral installations, earthworks and permanent site-specific works were in vogue, and soon the very phrase “public sculpture” had been replaced by public art, an amorphous new category in which art could be almost anything: LED signs, billboards, slide or video projections, guerrilla actions, suites of waterfalls. But over the past 15 years public sculpture — that is, static, often figurative objects of varying sizes in outdoor public spaces — has become one of contemporary art’s more exciting areas of endeavor and certainly its most dramatically improved one.

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c.c. rider


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21 (PLUS) ACRE PARADISE IN THE WOODS OF VENUS, FLORIDA FOR SALE BY OWNER

via vz
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buynow price $3,000.00!

You are bidding on an orginal 1955 Packard Custom Clipper 4dr Sedan. There is no reserve!!! This car must go!!! The car has 35880 original miles, powered by a 352 V8 with 4 barrel carb and a freshly rebuilt Ultramatic Transmission. The Car Runs and Drives as is! The car comes complete with all parts, just awaiting restoration. Equipment included (All items are in working order unless noted): Power Brakes, Power Steering, Power Windows (Pass. Front does not work), Power Antenna, Radio (Does not work), Power Drivers Seat (Needs Repair, Half of seat works), Optional Torsion Level Ride System. Here is a list of work done and or parts replaced. New Windshield, New Brakes, Brake Hoses (Steel Lines), Rebuilt Master Cylinder and Power Brake Unit, Overhauled Radiator, Rebuilt Water Pump, Valve Job on Engine Heads, Overhauled and Seal Coated Gas Tank and a New Fuel Pump. Details: The back of the rear seat needs to be reupholstered, the entire front seat and the bottom of the rear seat are in excelent condition, the front seat is still wraped in plastic. There is some minor rust on the right rear bottom quarter panel and lower left side tail lamp, otherwise the rest of the car is solid. The Carburator needs to be rebuilt.

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m. schwartz coachbuilder

the big book of barris


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