cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

The government will review its decision not to list Robin Hood Gardens in a major boost for BD’s campaign to save the east London housing estate.

Responding to an appeal made by the Twentieth Century Society, the DCMS confirmed that culture secretary Andy Burnham would review architecture minister Margaret Hodge’s verdict on the Smithsons-designed estate, in an admission that “significant new evidence” in favour of listing had been put forward.

[link] [add a comment]

In 2006, the Eero Saarinen-designed Bell Telephone Laboratories was in imminent danger of demolition by would-be developer, Preferred Real Estate Investments of Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, who planned to replace it with smaller office buildings and housing units on the site’s pastoral 472 acres. Now, two years later, Somerset Development, a Lakewood, New Jersey, firm, has signed a contract with Alcatel-Lucent, the property owner. If redevelopment proceeds as planned, the 1.9-million-square-foot, six-story building, named to Preservation New Jersey’s “10 Most Endangered Historic Sites” list in 2007, and recently declared eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places, will be spared the wrecking ball.

In a statement made via email, Somerset president Ralph Zucker wrote that the firm does “not plan on demolishing any of the existing structures,” and is “approaching this with a preservationist attitude.” Somerset is still in the early planning stages, but feels the building lends itself to a mix of uses. Zucker, a proponent of New Urbanism, wrote that his vision is “a downtown-style, mixed-use environment created at [the] building.”

[link] [add a comment]

The music goes 'round and around Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho And it comes out here


[link] [add a comment]

rip don lafontaine


[link] [add a comment]

hello, im a jukebox


[link] [add a comment]

rip jerry reed


[link] [add a comment]

pa dot bicycle drivers manual


[link] [add a comment]

compact washer dryer combo


[link] [add a comment]

nice collection of small houses at design boom

...that they collected from little diggs and tiny house

thx lisa
[link] [add a comment]

anton maiden


[link] [add a comment]

concerning an evolved spoofulation

The point I am making though is that spoof practice has evolved. The basic idea is to make something in extraction, color, concentration and heavily perfumed with familiar/monotone aromatics. Clumsy and expensive practices are one way to get there, but bowing to market pressure, many producers are getting there in a more natural way. This doesn't make the wines any more attractive to people who don't like the old-fashioned spoof.

Conversely, working naturally doesn't automatically make your wine sing. There are so many factors, variables and finally it is what you have in the fields that matters the most.

Or something like that.
via jim
[link] [4 comments]

amy goodman arrested in st paul w/ two producers

other arrests
[link] [1 comment]

the guardian chooses top 50 arts vids

thx lisa!
[link] [add a comment]

may 1968 graffiti (happy labor day - STRIKE!)


[link] [add a comment]

SI 1/3


[link] [1 comment]

GD society of the spectacle


[link] [add a comment]

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


[link] [add a comment]

energy and how to get it


[link] [add a comment]

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.)

[link] [6 comments]

gloria!


[link] [add a comment]

fl1


[link] [2 comments]

love letters from nola (tony fitzpatrick)


[link] [1 comment]

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.

[link] [add a comment]

hotrod hoedown east coast fall event


[link] [add a comment]