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The New York Philharmonic would surely have had a better half-century with an acoustically superior home, and nonstentorian opera stars might have conquered New York but for the Met auditorium’s excessive dimensions. Overall, though, Lincoln Center’s benefits far outweigh its faults. Artistic pleasure would have been enhanced by a first-rate architectural landmark on the level of Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall In L.A. or Jean Nouvel’s Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. But Lincoln Center has given generations of never-satisfied New Yorkers something to complain about without fear of contradiction. One cannot imagine life in America’s cultural capital without it.

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For the past three years, visitors to Dinosaur National Monument, which straddles the border of Utah and Colorado, have been unable to enter one of the park’s top attractions: the Quarry Visitor Center.


Designed by the San Francisco firm of Anshen and Allen and completed in 1958, the Modernist structure features a round concrete-block administrative building with a sinuous ramp leading to a glass-walled exhibit hall, which contains a quarry of Jurassic-period dinosaur bones and other fossils. But the visitor center was built on unstable bentonite clay, causing it to shift and sway. Photographs on the monument’s Web site show uneven door frames, cracked exterior walls, and detached support columns. In 2006, structural engineers deemed the landmark unsafe and recommended that it be closed.

Now, due in part to $13.1 million in federal stimulus funds, portions of the visitor center will be demolished and a new building, designed by Barker Rinker Seacat Architecture, of Denver, will be constructed nearby. Another Colorado firm, Andrews & Anderson Architects, of Golden, will renovate and reinforce the exhibit hall, with its distinctive butterfly roof, that encloses the quarry.

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on seeing the barn

from comments: "My suggestion to overcome this “aura” of reproduction, especially with the “Most photographed barn” is: peyote before sunrise. The Tetons never looked more awesome."
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the speakeasy trend


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tony fitzpatrick


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wfmu search central


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In late 70's, a keeper of a rubber company worked out the prototype of the UFO house using his own factory. He want to build a contemporary style holiday resort. However, the rubber company closed down in the energy crisis in 1980. The UFO houses that was just begining was sealed up by the bank. In that time, there was only foundation and FPR compoments.

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rock my religion


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5272
Mark Dagley’s 222 Bowery studio (1987)


A good artist does not need anything.

—Ad Reinhardt

When NYFA Current asked me to write a first-person account of the circumstances surrounding a not-so-recent exhibition of my paintings, a show that took place at Tony Shafrazi Gallery nearly a quarter of a century ago, I was surprised by their interest, but gladly jumped at the chance. I never hesitate to admit to any and all who care to listen that my 1987 New York City debut was considered a failure by local critics and collectors, not to mention the disappointed dealer. While preshow interest was high, in the end little work sold, and a well-regarded ARTFORUM writer snarkily dissed my efforts. Paradoxically, this perceived failure launched me on a fairly successful trajectory in the European art world: Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland—but that’s another story.

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Iggy Pop's French inspired jazz album, Preliminaires (Foreplay), will be in stores on June 2 via Astralworks. Along with originals, the album also includes takes on Les Feuilles Mortes (Autumn Leaves) in the original French and Antonio Carlos Jobim's How Insensitive.

In describing the album, Pop called it a "quieter album, with some jazz overtones, because at one point, I just got sick of listening to idiot thugs with guitars banging out crappy music and I've started listening to a lot of New Orleans-era, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton type of jazz."

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My last morning was like any other. I awakened with my mouth open, in the snow, with no shelter to speak of. Some of us called the empty lots behind the old matzo shop, at the corner of Norfolk and Rivington, the toxic waste dump. One never knew what or who might end up there, shiny needles, wine and other more intimate fluids were exchanged freely, we kept each other warm with song, spit and stories, of better, longer days and places where the sun filtered soft and lovely through fluttering leaves and left Indian paint patterns on our innocent faces.

Maybe there were fifty or so of us in the lot that night, none of our mothers when they walked us to kindergarten that first day and left us in the parking lot imagined their lovely child would ever end up in a place like this, even for one night. Everyone knows vacant lots are haunted by the men who once came home here where the walk was and hugged their pealing children tightly to their chests. It was almost an entire block, big enough for a baseball field. Some of us had fashioned temporary bivouac structures out of discards: cardboard boxes, found pieces of wood and orphaned plastic tarp.

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wooden surfboards are back! grain surfboards of maine

via justin at materialicious
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gas powered la-z-boy

via jbf
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These books and website on the blizzard of signs that direct our lives offers a guide to the quizzical, the hilarious, and the sophisticated science behind their creation.


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This is no victory, says Owen Hatherley in Militant Modernism. We are in the grip of Ikea modernism, he argues, which has as much to do with the muscular movement that advanced through Britain after the Second World War as New Labour has to do with Clement Attlee. Modernism, the preserve of the middle classes, is now considered "too good" or too difficult for the disordered masses. It has been supplanted by "sandal-wearing continental modernism, freeze-dried and smug", just another flavour in the aesthetic ice cream parlour of consumer choice, its artefacts annexed by the heritage industry.

In this sparky, polemical and ferociously learned book, Hatherley - an icon contributor - makes his case for a modernist reformation by eulogising some of its less-appreciated past glories. Modernism, far from being just another chapter in the history of architecture or the interior decorator's sourcebook, is nothing if it is not a comprehensive, utopian social programme. As such, it is a potentially useful "index of ideas" for progressives. As you might have guessed, Hatherley is writing from a position firmly on the left - he suggests that modernism provides a blueprint for a radical left-wing alternative to the existing world, a positive proposal for a political persuasion at the moment fixated on protest and rejection.

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More than 35 years after they recorded their first album (released only as an 8-track tape), The Flatlanders -- Texas singer-songwriters Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock -- are back together.


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Lawsuit Aims to Prevent Razing of New Orleans Historic District

In 2008, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed New Orleans’ Charity Hospital and the neighborhood surrounding it, the Mid-City Historic District, on its list of America’s most endangered historic places. Now, the Trust is taking its protective efforts a step further.

On May 1, the Trust filed a lawsuit against the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), claiming that their involvement in a plan to bulldoze part of the historic district to make way for two new hospitals is illegal and immoral. One of the facilities will be owned by the state and will serve as a Louisiana State University teaching hospital. It is being partly funded by FEMA. The other facility is to be built by the VA. The projects were jointly announced last November, with the enthusiastic support of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

The lawsuit, filed in a federal district court in Washington, D.C., holds that the governmental agencies violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to adequately analyze the impact of the medical complex on the Mid-City district, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The two projects would mean the loss of 165 homes within 15 square blocks, according to the Trust.

“Historic properties are within the scope of NEPA and must be considered in the environmental review process,” says Elizabeth S. Merritt, deputy general counsel for the Trust. “They avoided the requirements of the process by splitting the review into phases rather than evaluating the impact of the entire development.”

The Trust is not suing the state or LSU because they do not have a “legal responsibility to comply with NEPA,” according to Merritt. Only federal agencies are required to comply.

Spokesmen for FEMA and the VA declined to comment, citing a policy not to publicly speak about active litigation. According to Michael DiResto, a spokesman for the state of Louisiana, the state is confident that the two agencies are fully compliant with federal law. “This attempt to interrupt these critically needed projects is both untimely and without basis,” says DiResto.

While not widely known outside of New Orleans, the Mid-City district is rich in iconic New Orleans architectural styles, such as Creole cottages and shotgun houses. Since the neighborhood was identified as the probable location of the new hospitals, preservationists and community advocates have rallied against the plan and urged the state and the VA to consider alternative options.

The LSU facility would replace the university’s former teaching hospital, Charity Hospital (1939), designed by Weiss, Dreyfous and Seiferth. The Art Deco-style building suffered severe flood damage during Hurricane Katrina and never reopened. The proposed new facility is being designed by the local firm Blitch Knevel Architects and Seattle-based NBBJ. FEMA is providing partial funding for the $1.2 billion, 1.1-million-square-foot project as compensation for the loss of Charity Hospital.

The $925-million VA facility, already funded by Congress, will replace a VA hospital that also was damaged beyond repair by Katrina. The new, 1-million-square-foot facility is being designed by Studio NOVA—a team of architects from NBBJ’s Columbus, Ohio office and two New Orleans firms, Eskew+Dumez+Ripple and Rozas Ward Architects. Construction is scheduled to start in 2010.

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Ferrari Sells for a Record $12.4 Million


wango tango


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the trades


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Opening Reception: Thursday, May 28, 6-8pm

New York, NY, May 1, 2009 - David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce Slough, a group exhibition curated by gallery artist Steve DiBenedetto.

The impetus behind this exhibition is the flexibility of the word slough, which has various interpretations. Pronounced slew, slough can describe a bog-like, swampy, dark, primordial and somewhat mysterious realm. The alternate and less used, but maybe also appropriate interpretation, is a state of moral degradation or spiritual dejection that one cannot extract oneself from. Pronounced sluff, slough refers to that which has been cast aside or shed off, like a skin. It can also describe the manner in which material tends to accumulate at the edges of a performed task, such as the accumulation of dust on the rim of a fan, snow on the edge of a shovel, or trash in the breakdown lane of a highway.

Either way, these notions, in a very general sense, will be used as the stimulus to explore ideas about marginal territory, accumulation, holes and residue. Some works will have a more obvious connection to these conditions, (i.e., Larry Poons, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Tony Feher), while other works might be a little more unexpectedly related, (i.e., Jessica Craig Martin, Philip Taaffe, and Hanneline Rogeberg).

A certain dynamic at work will be the inclusion of things that may not even be apparent as art at first, coexisting with virtual masterpieces of traditional forms. The works, which represent a highly diverse range of mediums, from established 20th century masters to cutting edge contemporary artists, will associate with various states of deterioration and repair, forging unusual and unforeseen connections between old and new work.

While not an exact follow-up to DiBenedetto's last curatorial effort, Loaf (2000), which involved sculpture exclusively, Slough does bring back some of the same artists.

Proposed artists include: Vito Acconci, Joe Bradley, Werner Büttner, Dan Colen, Carroll Dunham, Keith Edmier, Tony Feher, Lucio Fontana, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Eugène Leroy, Markus Lüpertz, Jon Kessler, Fabian Marcaccio, Jessica Craig Martin, Matthew McCaslin, Pat McElnea, Jonathan Meese, John Miller, Malcolm Morley, Larry Poons, Hanneline Rogeberg, Dieter Roth, Alexander Ross, Bill Schwarz, Mike Scott, Michelle Segre, Frank Stella, Philip Taaffe, and Andy Warhol, among others.

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water tank pool bosque co tx


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theres a collectors club for everything


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the big book of cattle brands

via things mag blog
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The new five-block-long mall is the largest of a series of such spaces that now stretch from the Theater District down to Herald Square and Madison Square Park. Conceived by the city’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, the plan is partly inspired by the redevelopment of downtown Copenhagen, many of whose medieval streets and plazas have been closed off to cars in the past decade.

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