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The legend begins with Erwin George Baker. Baker was born in Indiana in 1882. Throughout the 1930s, he became an extremely popular motorcycle and automobile race driver. Cannonball BakerAmong the many accomplishments in his prestigious career; he won the first ever race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909, placed 11th in the 1922 Indianapolis 500 and became the first commissioner of NASCAR. However, he gained his greatest notoriety in 1915 after a New York to Los Angeles drive which took 11 days and 7 hours. It was this intercontinental drive that earned him the nickname “Cannonball” after the famous Illinois Central railway car, “The Cannonball”. In 1933 he would make the cross country trek again, but this time, he’d do it in only 53 hours and 30 minutes, a record that would stand for almost 40 years. “Cannonball” Baker would pass away in 1960 as one of the most revered and popular automobile and motorcycle drivers of all time. He was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1998.

Brock YatesFast forward to 1968. Brock Yates is an executive editor for Car & Driver magazine. He writes a scathing article called “The Grosse Pointe Myopians”, which critiques the auto industry, its management and its products which makes him infamous within the auto industry. Then, in 1971, Yates, along with fellow Car & Driver editor Steve Smith, decides to create an unofficial, and illegal, intercontinental road race. Inspired by the travel records of Erwin “Cannonball” Baker, the race begins in New York and ends in Redondo Beach, CA. Officially dubbed the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, the race would serve as a celebration of the US national highway system and also a protest of the soon-to-be passed 55mph speed limit. Yates wanted to prove that careful drivers can safely navigate this country’s interstate system at high speeds in much the same way the Germans do with the Autobahn. Yates also believed that if Erwin Baker could complete the journey in a record time of 53 hours and 30 minutes over unfinished roads and horrible conditions, then a modern driver should have no problem doing it over the uninterrupted expanse of the national interstate system.

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Does anyone now believe that Modernism in any of the arts simply disappeared into a black hole in order to make room for Postmodernism? You don’t have to go back far in time to discover trendy architectural academics that were promulgating variations on this theme. As a result of this massive historical distortion codified both in highbrow architectural journalism and college texts, some lesser known architects dedicated to thinking of Modernism as an ever-regenerative mind-set and rigorous tool kit for bold design were marginalized. And among the most talented? Gunnar Birkerts.

My first experience of Birkerts’ architectural power was during a visit to the Kemper Museum of Modern Art and Design in Kansas City. Overshadowed by the nearby Nelson-Atkins museum, it must be the most overlooked small museum in the U.S. Gunnar Birkerts: Metaphoric Modernist offers a fine assortment of Birkerts’ plans: initial and finished drawings and clear color photographs of the Kemper. Martin Schwartz, whose commentary fills most of this text, describes the Kemper as “muscular and assertive even if it is only about 23,000 square feet in area. One observer is reported to have called this museum, ‘the biggest little building he ever saw.’” I would concur – and add that the interior spaces possess a swooping vertiginous dynamism wholly appropriate to the Kemper’s collection. Think of an architect influenced by Aalto who brings to that Northern European austere sensibility the flash and dash of Futurism.

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esquerita rules

the hound
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twentinox sierra papa large chain mail


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milk design stairs and rails


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bebo y chucho valdes


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1800I
KOKO architektid fahle house


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marmol radziner prefabs


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c. 1765 PELATIAH LEETE, III HOUSE, GUILFORD CT

via amy wilson
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altered images


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Musician Chris Butler was looking for a house where he could make loud music without disturbing his neighbors. He found the perfect house and for a deal, but it came with certain "conditions." The house was the childhood home of Jeffrey Dahmer and the scene of Dahmer's first killing.


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jeepcrate

the car talk guys were yacking about the legend of the $50.00 army surplus jeep in a crate packed in cosmoline.

via jeepparts


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restore antique meat slicer blog


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ni-3 cube end table


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stunningly wild collection of hand made glass objects by andy paiko including his absinthe fountains

via vz
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"Like an echo from the caves of coccamaura, i came forth whilst Dierdre wept cool tears” – from a celtic fairy tale. The bust, "Deirdre" was a true collaboration between the two of us. Mr. Little presented Mr. Sellers with the concept of crafting a weeping bust that cried tears of wax. Mr. Sellers sculpted the bust based on a neo-classical inspiration. The functionality of the piece is quite remarkable as the back of the sculpture is carved on an angle allowing for the melting wax to flow through the opening of the eyes.
via vz
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Chip Taylor attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York. After an unsuccessful attempt to become a professional golfer, Taylor entered the music business. He wrote and composed pop and rock songs, both alone and with other songwriters including Al Gorgoni (as the duo Just Us), Billy Vera, Ted Daryll, and Jerry Ragovoy.

Taylor's best known songs are "Wild Thing", which was originally recorded in 1965 by Jordan Christopher & The Wild Ones but became best known as a 1966 hit single for The Troggs (and a 1967 live performance by Jimi Hendrix), and "Angel of the Morning", a hit first for Merrilee Rush in 1968, and then becoming an even bigger hit in 1981 for country-pop singer Juice Newton (whose single sold more than a million copies in the United States). Other Taylor compositions that made entries onto the pop and country charts include "He Sits at Your Table" (Willie Nelson), "I Can't Let Go", "The Baby" (The Hollies), "Worry" (Johnny Tillotson), "Make Me Belong to You", "I Can Make It With You" (The Pozo Seco Singers, Jackie DeShannon), "Any Way That You Want Me" (The Troggs, Evie Sands, Juice Newton), "Step Out of Your Mind", "Country Girl City Man", "I'll Hold Out My Hand", "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" (Janis Joplin) and "Lonely Is As Lonely Does" (The Fleetwoods). Country hits written and composed by Taylor include "Sweet Dream Woman" (Waylon Jennings), "A Little Bit Later On Down the Line" (Bobby Bare) and "Son of a Rotten Gambler" (Emmylou Harris, the Hollies, Anne Murray).
interviewed and featured on michael shelly wfmu


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hunt and tony sales on rundgren radio


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Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it’s hard to say what people were expecting, given the magnitude of the disaster and the hopes raised in the weeks immediately following. Seventeen days after the storm, President George W. Bush stood in Jackson Square and promised: “We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.” The terms we, as long as it takes, and help turned out to be fairly elastic. The Federal Emergency Management Agency shuttered its long-term recovery office about six months later, after a squabble with the city over who would pay for the planning process. Since then, depending on whom you talk to, government at all levels has been passive and slow-moving at best, or belligerent and actively harmful at worst. Mayor Ray Nagin occasionally surfaces to advertise a big new scheme (a jazz park, a theater district), about which no one ever hears again. A new 20-year master plan and comprehensive zoning ordinance was being ironed out early this summer, but it remains subject to city-council approval. A post-Katrina master plan has been under discussion since before the floodwaters were pumped out.

In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city’s neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan. It’s at once exhilarating and frightening to behold.
via jim louis
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indigo


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burenawning

The paintings exhibited here in the gallery represent the first works in which Buren started using a pre-printed fabric to express his vision. Up until this point, the artist had been painting colored shapes, specifically stripes, on various fabrics and colored bed sheets. In September of 1965, while in a Parisian market, Buren found different kinds of commonly used pre-printed striped fabrics, including one with alternating white and colored stripes. Buren realized this was the perfect medium in which to create his work, reducing his paintings to their simplest visual and physical elements and ridding them of allusion or subjectivity. Each stripe has a standard width of 8.7cm and was limited to the colors green, yellow, blue, red, orange, brown, and black interspersed with equidistant white bands. Given these standardized limitations, Buren varied the size and proportion of the canvases. He would then apply white painted lines or scalloped patterning at the edges of these canvases to differentiate his work from a readymade. The artist was able to break down the paintings to the very basic components of the work – a partly painted surface, a support and its surroundings.

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In 1844, the missionaries in Mangalore, who knew a little about weaving business, took the initiative and started a weaving industry to give employment. Local weavers were also employed to train young boys. The looms of Basel Mission at Mangalore were pioneering and it was because of master weaver, John Haller that Khaki got its global recognition.

However, there is an interesting reference to the birth of Khaki. Sir Henry Lumsden, who was stationed in India in 1846, dyed his cotton pajamas with a plant extract, mazari, to create a uniform more suitable to the climate than the traditional red felt issued at the time. Its tawny color, similar to the region's saffron dust, helped the clothing to blend in with sand. The term 'Khaki' comes from the Hindi and Urdu word for 'earth' or 'dust-coloured' .

Lumsden commanded a British army unit in the Punjab. The uniform at that time included resplendent white trousers worn with red tunics. He began wearing pajama bottoms, primarily to find a more comfortable alternative to the trousers in the tropical Punjab heat. The pajamas were of a lighter material and less tightly fitted.

To disguise them somewhat, he decided to colour them with a dye that would blend in with the local terrain. He decided to use mazari, a native plant. Lumsden soon realized that his new uniform has another advantage than just comfort. His new Khaki uniform trousers were more suitable in battle than the very conspicuous white pants and red tunic. There were real advantages to being able to blend in with the terrine.

John Haller, a trained European weaver, introduced in 1851 the first handloom with fly shelter cottage industry in Mangalore. He also invented new dyes and colour out of indigenous ingredients. The invention of Khaki dye is attributed to him.

Lord Robertson who visited the weaving establishment was recommended the newly invented Khaki for the British army uniform the world over. The factory was the most important work of the Basel Mission started in the district in 1865.

Haller set up a laboratory and began experimenting with methods for dyeing and weaving fabric. He began to market Khaki and eventually the fabric was adopted by the British Armed Services as the material for uniforms for their troops around the world. Haller expanded production by importing twenty-one looms from Europe, thus upgrading the weaving industry from a cottage industry to a small manufacturing industry.

He experimented with the sap of the bark of the semecarpus tree, and here found the colour that came to clothe the marching men of many nations.

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More than four decades into his career Frederick Wiseman remains the most prominent invisible man of American documentary film. His movies offer no voice-over, no talking heads, no graphics or intertitles: in other words, none of the cues and signposts we have come to expect from nonfiction films. Mr. Wiseman, who turns 80 in January, has likened his approach, to “getting rid of the proscenium arch in the theater.” This dictum applies even when his subjects are on an actual stage, as in “La Comédie-Française,” his 1996 study of that venerable repertory company, and his latest film, “La Danse,” another French cultural immersion, this time with the Paris Opera Ballet.
via kc
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