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FEMA TRAILER A, B, C's

A) FEMA paid more than 2 billion on travel trailers for disaster relief after katrina and rita.

B) hundreds of gulf coast residents have filed law suits claiming that the trailers have made them sick due to high levels of formaldehyde.

C) FEMA is paying aprox 115 million a year to store 120,000 trailers at 21 locations. fema refused requests to deploy them after ike and they wont sell them despite having received numerous offers.


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the hound remembers hank ballard


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baumraum


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Also in the 1880's there was a family in Lower Manhattan who owned a lot of hotels. Each hotel was named after a son. Albert Pinkham Ryder, a famous painter, had the good fortune to be born to them and not many of the crazy artists in the HOTEL ALBERT realize it is named after him.

Artists, writers, filmers and rock groups on the way up stay at the CHELSEA HOTEL on West 23rd Street. The damaged and the losers on the way down stay at the ALBERT HOTEL on University Place in the Village. Chelsea is uppers; the Albert is downers. Coke in the penthouse; smack in the ghetto. I live a yo-yo life.

After a few economic disasters I had to move to the Albert with my main woman Valerie Herouvis. Fluxus Jerry Benjamin, Bruce the Jeweler, Mad Marie, Rene Ricard, Diane DiPrima, Louise the Lesbian, Maggie Morphine, Suzy Sniff and Yoko Ono.... We all knew each other from the streets and Max's Kansas City restaurant. Some people got so fucked up the "Albert" is on the way UP for them. Einstein wasn't kidding when he thought up the theory of relativity. We never could have had the Twentieth Century without it.

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modern home philadelphia


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Abramovic – plus hunky sculptor boyfriend – lived in a huge, virtually empty loft, the sole furnishings being a dining table and chairs in the very centre of the room and a spindly old stereo from the 1960s. The space was probably a hundred feet on either side – ‘major real estate, of course’, as Sontag proudly explained to me. (She loved using Vanity Fair-ish clichés.) She and Abramovic smothered one another in hugs and kisses. I meanwhile blanched in fright: I’d just caught sight of two of the other guests, who, alarmingly enough, turned out to be Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. Reed (O great rock god of my twenties) stood morosely by himself, humming, doing little dance steps and playing air guitar. Periodically he glared at everyone – including me – with apparent hatred. Anderson – elfin spikes of hair perfectly gelled – was chatting up an Italian man from the Guggenheim, the man’s trophy wife and the freakish-looking lead singer from the cult art-pop duo Fischerspooner. The last-mentioned had just come back from performing at the Pompidou Centre and wore booties and tights, a psychedelic shawl and a thing like a codpiece. He could have played Osric in a postmodern Hamlet. He was accompanied by a bruiser with a goatee – roadie or boyfriend, it wasn’t clear – and emitted girlish little squeals when our first course, a foul-smelling durian fruit just shipped in from Malaysia, made its way to the table.

Everyone crowded into their seats: despite the vast size of the room, we were an intime gathering. Yet it wouldn’t be quite right merely to say that everyone ignored me. As a non-artist and non-celebrity, I was so ‘not there’, it seemed – so cognitively unassimilable – I wasn’t even registered enough to be ignored. I sat at one end of the table like a piece of anti-matter. I didn’t exchange a word the whole night with Lou Reed, who sat kitty-corner across from me. He remained silent and surly. Everyone else gabbled happily on, however, about how they loved to trash hotels when they were younger and how incompetent everybody was at the Pompidou. ‘At my show I had to explain things to them a thousand times. They just don’t know how to do a major retrospective.’

True, Sontag tried briefly to call the group’s attention to me (with the soul-destroying words, ‘Terry is an English professor’); and Abramovic kindly gave me a little place card to write my name on. But otherwise I might as well not have been born. My one conversational gambit failed dismally: when I asked the man from the Guggenheim, to my right, what his books were about, he regarded me disdainfully and began, ‘I am famous for – ,’ then caught himself. He decided to be more circumspect – he was the ‘world’s leading expert on Arte Povera’ – but then turned his back on me for the next two hours. At one point I thought I saw Laurie Anderson, at the other end of the table, trying to get my attention: she was smiling sweetly in my direction, as if to undo my pathetic isolation. I smiled in gratitude in return and held up my little place card so she would at least know my name. Annoyed, she gestured back impatiently, with a sharp downward flick of her index finger: she wanted me to pass the wine bottle. I was reduced to a pair of disembodied hands – like the ones that come out of the walls and give people drinks in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.

Sontag gave up trying to include me and after a while seemed herself to recede curiously into the background. Maybe she was already starting to get sick again; she seemed oddly undone. Through much of the conversation (dominated by glammy Osric) she looked tired and bored, almost sleepy. She did not react when I finally decided to leave – on my own – just after coffee had been served. I thanked Marina Abramovic, who led me to the grungy metal staircase that went down to the street and back to the world of the Little People. Turning round one last time, I saw Sontag still slumped in her seat, as if she’d fallen into a trance, or somehow just caved in. She’d clearly forgotten all about me.

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credit crunch crushes MoMA’s houses of the future


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Over the next 15 years, FBI agents closely tracked the grand and mundane aspects of the acclaimed novelist's life, according to previously confidential government files. Agents questioned his friends, scoured his passport file, thumbed through his best-selling books and circulated his photo among informants. They kept records on his appearances at writers conferences, talk shows and peace rallies. They noted the volume of envelopes in his mailbox and jotted down who received his Christmas cards. They posed as his friend, chatted with his father and more than once knocked on his door disguised as deliverymen.

Then the agents headed back to the office to file multiple copies of long reports stamped CLASSIFIED and SECRET and SUBV. CONTROL, apparently referring to a program to watch suspected subversives.

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jersey city pride


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Lopate: Not to get us too depressed, but can we talk about ground zero?

Huxtable: The first piece I wrote predicted what was going to happen. People thought I was clairvoyant. No, I’d just been watching the city for a long time. We all knew! The strange thing that came along was this small group of bereaved families, who really knew how to operate, and who did not speak for the rest of the group at all, but who began to roll over the politicians.

If there’s anything a politician will roll over for, it’s this kind of grief. After all the good things they vetoed or interfered with, cultural institutions like the Freedom museum because they were worried something unpatriotic might be exhibited there, they now have this memorial, and nobody has any concept how overscaled it is. A huge memorial, and these profit-making towers. Daniel Libeskind’s original architectural inspiration has been stripped away, and the developer, Larry Silverstein, got everything he wanted.

It is a horrible failure, as far as I’m concerned. We missed the chance to make a 21st-century Rockefeller Center.


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a certain apartment on a certain bucks county farm


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earth pigments


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English Heritage yesterday announced a grant to save arguably the most horrible building it has ever attempted to rescue, the sprawling Victorian hulk of Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, which housed the equally ramshackle geniuses who broke Germany's second world war codes.

"English Heritage isn't only concerned with great architectural set-pieces," its chief executive, Simon Thurley, said, announcing a £330,000 grant for urgent repairs, one of the largest such grants ever made by the organisation, on what he called "a fascinating group of buildings".

Sir Francis Richards, chairman of the Bletchley Park Trust, said: "It is hideous, but one can develop a fondness for the place. This grant comes in the nick of time; the roof is at its last gasp."

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lot of 970 steam paving machine images on ebay


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hollis frampton preview


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mary heilmann club chairs


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007
frank stella untitled 1956 mix


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Rothko was trying to revive the idea central to modernism - that art can shatter our assumptions. His Seagram murals remain the most challenging art in Tate Modern - because they demand your time, emotion, thought and commitment, only to throw these things back in your face, confronting the mind with a wall, a terminal chamber.

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1278


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not pollock
not pollock
marilyn
cow
not cow


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bilde

And architecture had Eliel and Eero Saarinen, the Finnish father-son duo who revolutionized the way people thought about buildings in the Modernist boom after World War II. Their plans for nine buildings at Drake University, which borrowed more elements from boxy factories than columned academia, identified the school as "a forward-looking, modern university that was committed to innovative design," according to Maura Lyons, who curated a new show about the architects that opens next weekend in the Anderson Gallery.

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The first time I met Enzo Mari, he was giving a talk at the Serpentine Gallery in London. It turned out to be more of a rant, as the great Italian designer railed scornfully against his pet hates. Design - dead. Architecture - dead too. Western civilization - ditto. Spotting the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas among the audience, he denounced him as "a pornographic window dresser."

Afterward I asked Mari if there was any aspect of contemporary life that pleased him. A lengthy silence followed, until he said: "Bread and terrorism." Why terrorism? "Why not?" snorted Mari. "People think it's bad, but if they thought about it, they'd realize it isn't all bad. It changes things."

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If Brad Cloepfil's new Museum of Arts and Design were simply another white box for art, it would be just plain mean not to give it a decent grade. It's humanly scaled, nicely detailed, and allows light to flutter into the galleries through strategically placed horizontal and vertical slits. Visitors get intimate bird's-eye views of Central Park and Columbus Circle, along with congenial spaces to contemplate art. It's a conscientious if unspectacular effort.

Yet it's impossible to forget that this decorous little tower was once something flamboyant, fun, and maybe even a little foolish, a swinging '60s art museum designed by Edward Durell Stone for the eccentric heir to the A&P fortune, Huntington Hartford.

Cloepfil and his team at Allied Works Architecture literally wrapped their new museum around the concrete bones of Stone's white marble folly. But they failed to exorcise its ghosts, and now they hover in eternal reproach. It feels as if all the idiosyncrasies were focus-grouped out of the place.

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barny is a nasty little shit. just like his dad


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