cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour examines the turmoil that surrounded the late-1960s variety show. With a young and brash stable of writers and performers, including Steve Martin and Rob Reiner, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour brought an edgy new brand of political comedy to the airwaves for three seasons. When they were fired in 1969, brothers Tom and Dick Smothers took their network, CBS, to court ... and won. This is the fascinating, true story as told by its key players, including the Smothers Brothers, show writers Rob Reiner and Mason William, performers Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Harry Belafonte, and former CBS executives.


[link] [add a comment]

Guitar evanglists, singing preachers and the like....

at the hound
[link] [add a comment]

the endangered french cafe


[link] [add a comment]

Shipping Container Steel Building - Plans & Manuals CD


[link] [add a comment]

shakerst

Shaker Stove/Built-in Closet
Rendered by John W. Kelleher (artist), c. 1938
watercolor, graphite, and gouache on paper
overall: 27.8 x 20.6 cm (10 15/16 x 8 1/8 in.)
Original IAD Object: 68" high; 17" wide (closet)
Index of American Design
1943.8.13677


[link] [2 comments]

science class tables via workalicious


[link] [add a comment]

arts & architecture




[link] [add a comment]

hendrix for everyone

and lou too


[link] [1 comment]

jinhua-architecture-park


[link] [add a comment]

electric mini cooper


[link] [1 comment]

The Fontainebleau was gutted to the studs, its 22-acre grounds completely redrawn. Developers added three upscale signature chefs' restaurants and an enormous new beachfront spa to accommodate 1,504 guest rooms -- just under half of them suites in two new towers. Each features granite counters, walk-in showers and separate jetted tubs, flat-screen TVs and even a new Apple computer. That last part is the centerpiece of the "paperless" hotel -- meaning all guest correspondence will be electronic.

New owner Jeffrey Soffer's team, which bought the property for $500 million and shelled out another $500 million in upgrades, is also opening Fontainebleaus in Las Vegas (fall 2009), Dubai and a fourth, to-be-named location.

Though they wanted a new identity, designers strove to retain architect Morris Lapidus' original vision. For example, Lapidus' affinity for circles is clear throughout the hotel's spacious hallways, where elaborate chandeliers by Ai WeiWei, a consultant for the Beijing Olympics' Bird's Nest main stadium, hang from high-ceiling insets.

The grand lobby's original white-and-black bow-tie floor pattern was recreated out of new materials, and its furrowed columns were preserved and refurbished.

So too was the Fontainebleau's famed "Staircase to Nowhere," which historically led to a small coat room just above the lobby. Belles and beaus would take an elevator up, check their coats and descend the stairs for a grand entrance. The coat check is gone -- not a terribly sensible feature in the tropics, anyway -- but the runway remains.

[link] [add a comment]

alan zweibel on lopate


[link] [add a comment]

left wing political graphics


[link] [add a comment]

45 Vintage ‘Space Age’ Illustrations

via zoller
[link] [add a comment]

rain water harvesting


[link] [add a comment]

dat dere


[link] [add a comment]

frank lloyd wright an autobiography

rubble trench foundation


The desert offered a new challenge in materials. The architect's primary solution was "desert rubblestone wall" construction, usually shortened to "desert masonry." There are many ways of acheiving this, but all involved placing large stones into forms, then pouring concrete around the stones while leaving most of the face next to the form exposed. in the Bott house (S.404) wet sand was forced between form and stone surface before the concrete was poured. In the Austin house (S.345) crumpled newspaper was used instead of sand to keep stone faces from being covered with concrete. At Taliesin West, the mortar was allowed to seep around the edges of the stone face, and surplus was the chipped away to reveal the stone surface. Often, the stone was washed with acid to bring out its color.

[link] [add a comment]

The Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, has opted to court controversy with plans (to be announced at a 9 a.m. press conference today) that will plant a new 90,000-square-foot, Renzo Piano-designed building just west of Louis Kahn's 120,000-square-foot 1972 masterpiece.


[link] [add a comment]

SOLD!

105: Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Cow (Wallpaper)
Lot # 0105
Estimates: $3000 - $4000
Start Price: $1500
Sale Title: Post-War and Contemporary Art View entire catalog
Sale Location : Lambertville, New Jersey
Sale Date 9:00 AM PST - Nov 15th, 2008
Description Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Cow (Wallpaper), 1966;
Screenprint in colors (framed); From the edition of unknown size; Rubber stamp
signature in left margin; 41 3/4" x 27 3/4" (sight); Printer: Bill Miller's Wallpaper Studio, Inc., New York; Publisher: Factory Editions, New York for an exhibition at Leo
Castelli Gallery; Literature: F. & S. ll.11; Provenance: Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Private Collection, New York
Hammer Price $4750

108: Mike Bidlo (American, b. 1954) Not Warhol (Cow Wallpaper)
Lot # 0108
Estimates: $1500 - $2000
Start Price: $750
Sale Title: Post-War and Contemporary Art View entire catalog
Sale Location : Lambertville, New Jersey
Sale Date 9:00 AM PST - Nov 15th, 2008
Description Mike Bidlo (American, b. 1954) Not Warhol (Cow Wallpaper), 1984;
Screenprint (framed); Signed; 42 1/4" x 33 3/8" (sight); Provenance: Private Collection, New York
Hammer Price $4500


[link] [add a comment]

LONDON: Recession. Depression. Slump. Crash. Whatever it's called, and however severe it turns out to be, the economic crisis is bound to affect design. The question is how? Judging by design's fate in past recessions, it will suffer in this one. Some designers' clients will go out of business, and others will cut costs. Research and development budgets will be slashed. Designers' jobs will be lost, and projects scrapped. But there may be positive consequences too. Design has always coped well with austerity, and is especially well-equipped to do so now.

[link] [add a comment]

Kusama is a Japanese artist, a brilliant obsessive. Her work has been well regarded in the U.S. since the heyday of pop art. Christopher Burge, Christie's chairman, who was conducting the auction, coaxed the bidding up past four million dollars.

"It took a while. But I got there," he told the room, all avuncular charm, as the bidding resumed. "Four million nine hundred thousand … Five million dollars." There was an outbreak of clapping. "Five million one!"

At this, the final bid, the clapping became tremendous. There was cheering, and somebody hollered "Woohoo!" Clapping signifies that an artist's auction record has been broken, here for a work by a living female artist. The room pulsated with relief.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Kusama’s theme is repetition. Her ‘Air Mail Stickers’ [1962], consists of over 1,000 of the post office seals pasted onto a 181.6 x 171.5cm canvas. The inexactly-executed rows and columns in the piece - which forms part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s permanent collection - create a dizzying trompe d’oeil. Like Kusama’s ‘Infinity Net’ and polka-dot-field work, ‘Air Mail Stickers’ anticipates Andy Warhol’s use of repetition. "After Warhol came to my ‘1,000 Boat’ show, he called to ask permission to use my patterns in his silkscreens," recounts Kusama from her Tokyo studio. "But I refused. I had been working with repetition for years by that time, ever since my 1959 exhibition at the Brata gallery." Kusama leans forward and smiles, "Warhol’s repetitions came from me - But my repetitions came from my childhood."

[link] [add a comment]

sounddish2


[link] [1 comment]

Can we think of the resuscitation of a particular architecture style as a lazarus taxon? The term (borrowed from the field of paleontology) describes an animal that disappears from the fossil record, only to reappear again. There are some well-known examples, such as the coelacanth and the ivory-billed woodpecker [this example is in dispute]. These animals were thought extinct, but were subsequently discovered in their respective habitats. There is plenty of scholarship out there that considers how a lazarus taxon can appear to come back from the dead.

Can we apply such an idea, especially when writing and studying architecture history? The example that comes to mind is Reyner Banham's inclusion of Russian constructivism and Italian futurism in his important Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960). Prior works, such as Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), and Henry Russell Hitchcock's Modern Architecture (also 1936) exclude Russian and Italian experiments in modernism from their own polemical narratives. Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture (1941) does mention Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, but placing an image of Tatlin's Tower next to the lantern of Francesco Borromini's Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza suggests an unnatural interregnum.

[link] [add a comment]

Imagine a graph. This graph traces the historical trajectory of a particular art form. The y-axis could be a measure of something arbitrary, something like height, weight, volume, square footage, page length .... the list can go on for ever. The x-axis is time. And somewhere at the top right-hand corner of this matrix, the trajectory plateaus. It ceases to oscillate up and down. It just continues to move forward with no qualitative change.

This is an overtly simplistic historical model, a thumbnail sketch of a thumbnail sketch. It does, however, begin to capture a controversial and provocative idea brought to light in G.W.F. Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics (1832): that art has reached its end. Hegel's so-called "End of Art" thesis does not postulate an end to the making of art, but it does suggest that art has ceased to develop. The reason for this is complicated. It is related to Hegel's idea that as art develops from material to conceptual manifestations, it grows and declines. Like the graph mentioned above, it captures the idea that art not only has a history, but it is part of a historical process.

Modern architecture has often been cast as a strawman, a volitional agent that erased all sense of historical development of the art form. It was Norman Mailer, of all people, who cast the problem in such terms for a 1964 issue of The Architecture Forum. It is an idea that still resonates. Historian Mark Jarzombek problematizes this view in a 2007 article for Footprint, where he subjects architecture's modernity to a Hegelian crucible. Jarzombek writes:

Architecture begins its life as a modern philosophical project by a series of alienations and forced detachments from its presumptive disciplinary realities, realities that have enclosed and trapped it, according to Hegel, in the narrow discourse of scholarship and ideology. Though freed to engage the philosophical, architecture is denied an ongoing role in the advancement of metaphysics, has its origins in a competing artistic medium, has a philosophical history that is not related to its empirical history, and, finally, becomes architecture at the very moment it becomes no longer relevant in the dialectic of History, namely in the shift from work to miracle. In other words, Hegel makes architecture into something one can call "not-architecture": not a real building, but an "enclosure", not an ancient building, but a "sculpture"; not a free standing production, but the appearance of one, and not a miracle of representation, but a labour that ends in a mere simulacrum (2007:35).

[link] [add a comment]