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slow cruise on the highline
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) has announced that it will launch a series of public workshops to determine the programming for the future Memorial Museum. The museum, to be located at the World Trade Center site, will include fragments of materials from both the 1993 bombing and the 2001 attack. In collaboration with the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York and New York New Visions, each workshop will feature a presentation of preliminary programming concepts, currently by developed by curatorial planners Howard+Revis Design Services, Inc., institutional planning consultant LORD Cultural Resources Planning and Management, Inc., and the LMDC. The workshops will offer the public the opportunity to discuss their expectations for the Memorial Museum and to comment on the preliminary concepts. The final recommendations of the Memorial Center Advisory Committee can found on the LMDC’s website: www.RenewNYC.com/memorial.
more afghan war rugs
mark rothko - homage to matisse (1953)
you think your dad was tough - mp3 of murray wilson and the boys from the help me ronda sessions - in parts or the full 40 min version
Only weeks after the world lost the great R.L. Burnside, another stellar light of both the Fat Possum label and music in general has passed away; Paul "Wine" Jones died of cancer in Jackson, Mississippi on Sunday. He was age 59. His two discs Mule (1995) and Pucker Up Buttercup (1999) were pretty much in the similar vein of so many of his labelmates also plucked from obscurity and saddled in Oxford, Mississippi studios by FP chief excavators Matthew Johnson and Bruce Watson: raw, blazing display of an ever-dimming continuum between the roots of Delta jukejoints, Fred McDowell-style ass-shaking repetition and today's primitive blues done with pure spirit. With Junior Kimbrough, Asie Payton, RL Burnside and now Jones gone, that thread gets sadly thinner. Wine's sound was all his own vocabulary, and in the end influenced really by no one but himself and his surroundings. Buttercup is a fractured and odd blues record which at times rips speakers to shreds; it's the sound of someone barely familiar with a studio telling his story (joined by a fellow named Pickle on drums) in distortion-flecked sketches right down to the finale, appropriately titled "I Guess I Fucked It All Up." We at WFMU had the distinct pleasure of witnessing the man in action as he joined Kenny Brown and T-Model Ford for a hard-to-believe-they-were-rocking-AND-drinking-at-9AM live performance on David Suisman's Inner Ear Detour show back in 2004. Listen to his 4-song set here! (Real Audio) And also check out Pucker Up Buttercup's "Goin' Back Home" from another Inner Ear Detour show here (Real Audio). And, if you get a chance, do check out the excellent DVD documentary You See Me Laughin', which traces the story and the intertwining lives of many of these, the very last of the Hill Country Blues men. A third Jones album was in the works according to the Fat Possum catalog page that was originally due in January.via brian turner on fmu blog
a revamped wfmu beware of the blog w/ more bells and whistles
Porch Posts, Balusters, Rails, Etc.
The pumps at Station No. 1 are arranged in a neat row, their suction pipes reaching down under the building to connect to the city's vast network of drainage canals. The 12-foot 1913 pumps, designed by the engineer Albert Baldwin Wood, are still here, as are four more he designed in 1928. The last two, the biggest and most powerful, were built in the mid-90's.
The night of the storm, Mr. Martin said, "the two new pumps went out right away. They're the most powerful. They sound like freight trains. Four of the old ones kept going all night. The original two pumps, those are the most reliable. I'd use those two before I'd use any of the others."
He walked to the back of the shed, where two towering wood doors are held in place by heavy braces. As the storm picked up speed that night, 100-mile-per-hour winds pounded the doors, threatening to tear them from their frames. If the storm waters flowed past them, he knew, the station would stop functioning. So he threw himself against the doors, struggling to hold them back while screaming for help over the roar of the machines. The other men came running to help, jamming the wood braces between the doors and the machines. That night, the pump stations kept the city from flooding.
I also knew, or thought I knew, that right up to Thursday night, there had been just two houses in Uptown New Orleans with people inside them. In one, a couple of old coots had barricaded themselves behind plywood signs that said things like "Looters Will Be Shot" and "Enter and Die." The other, a fortlike house equipped with a massive power generator, was owned by Jim Huger - who happened to grow up in the house next door to my parents. (When I heard that he had the only air-conditioning in town and I called to ask if I could borrow a bed, he said, "I'm that little kid you used to beat on with a Wiffle Ball bat, and I gotta save your ass now?") In Jim Huger's house, until the night before, several other young men had holed up, collecting weapons and stories. Most of these stories entered the house by way of a reserve officer in the New Orleans Police Department, a friend of Jim's, who had gone out in full uniform each day and come back with news directly from other cops. From Tuesday until Thursday, the stories had grown increasingly terrifying. On Thursday, a police sergeant told him: "If I were you, I'd get the hell out of here. Tonight they gonna waste white guys, and they don't care which ones." This reserve cop had looked around and seen an amazing sight, full-time New Orleans police officers, en masse, fleeing New Orleans. "All these cops were going to Baton Rouge to sleep because they thought it wasn't safe to sleep in New Orleans," he told me. He had heard that by the time it was dark "there wouldn't be a single cop in the city."
Jean Prouvé: Three Nomadic Structures
MOCA
Pacific Design Center
Los Angeles, California
"He combines the soul of an engineer with that of an architect.”
--Le Corbusier
Prouvé (1901–84) sought to create furniture and simple lightweight metal building systems whose constructive logic permitted easy fabrication and use. His major preoccupation was with prefabrication technology for architecture, and all his work, from cafeteria chairs to public buildings to new solutions for temporary housing, adheres to the dictum "Never design anything that cannot be made.
arie kaplan
Kings of Comics, How Jews Created the Comic Book Industry
Knowing that I'm both a huge comic book fan and a writer for MAD Magazine, Reform Judaism Magazine recently asked me to write a three-part series on the history of Jews in comic books, "Kings of Comics". I got to interview industry legends like Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Jerry Robinson, and Joe Kubert, newer talents like Jon Bogdanove and Chris Claremont, and even my MAD colleagues like Drew Friedman, Peter Kuper, and Al Jaffee.
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Wizards of Wit - How Jews Revolutionized American Comedy
Reform Judaism Magazine wanted to write a series on Jewish Comedy Writers, so they chose (who else?) a Jewish Comedy Writer. I'm very proud of this series, especially since I got to interview some of my heroes, including Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Paul Peter Porges, Nora Ephron and Lewis Black, among many others
thoughtography
A. Kaprow - Rearrangeable Panels 2, 1958/94
Katarzyna Kobro
(1898 – 1951) Rosja – Polska RzeYba abstrakcyjna (1),
1924 szk?o, metal, drewno,
72 x 17,5 x 15,5
Dar grupy „a.r.”, 1932
wladyslaw strzeminski unism in painting
"Unist Composition II (10)", 1931, oil on canvas, Museum of Art, Lodz
Kompozycja Unistyczna 11, 1930-32 (essays)
Retain and restore those buildings that can be salvaged. Due to damage from contaminated water, extensive measures will be required to deal with mold. Gut-rehab will be required for many of the estimated 80% of the city’s 200,000 homes that have been damaged and, of course, many homes will not be salvageable. Building codes should address resistance to non-catastrophic flood damage—for example, the most flood-prone lower floors of houses should have no paper-faced drywall, no ductwork, no air handlers, no wall-to-wall carpeting, and no electrical service boxes. Retaining the character of New Orleans, which is defined in part by its vernacular architecture and its diversity, should be a high priority.
radical painting group chronology
marcia hafif beginning again
gallery artists charlotte jackson gallery SF NM
-- let’s elude to the new exhibition at Francis Naumann Fine Art on East 80th Street, where Mike Bidlo has installed 16 erased Willem de Kooning drawings of women, all of his own making -- the drawings and the erasures -- framed and matted, with a black-and-white photograph of the now-obliterated drawing taped to the back, and mounds of eraser shavings, or "ashes," displayed nearby under glass domes. Purchasers of each drawing get some residue of the destruction in a glassine envelope. The drawings are priced at $10,000 to $22,000.
Is Rauschenberg’s original avant-garde gesture, so shocking in its disrespect for art, and so Freudian as an esthetic Oedipal revolt, ever considered a blow against male chauvinism and its construction of woman as a devouring monster? It seems so here -- but the drawing isn’t so much eradicated as given a lighter touch.
Rauschenberg obliterated his de Kooning in 1953, during the dramatically avant-garde decade in which he also made empty white enamel paintings (designed as surfaces for cast shadows, in 1951) and painted the more-or-less identical Factum I and Factum II (as a poke at "Abstract Expressionist" authenticity, in 1957). For his "Not Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawing" series, Bidlo drew copies of de K’s Surrealist portrait of a bug-eyed Elaine de Kooning from ca. 1940-41 through the "Women" series of the 1950s to a late Screaming Girls from 1967-68.
Rauschenberg’s de Kooning is now of no consequence, a mere generic marker. But Bidlo’s de K’s are all canonical, well-known, iconic. Before he proceeded, Bidlo sought Rauschenberg’s okay for the project. The master of Captiva, Fla., who turns 90 next month, sent up his sage advice: "All artists take their chances."
Warhol made the point himself : "So on one hand I really believe in empty spaces, but on the other hand, because I'm still making some art, I'm still making junk for people to put in their spaces that I believe should be empty : i.e., I'm helping people waste their space, when what I really want to do is help them empty their space" (The Philosophy of Andy Warhol). And again, quoted by Alan Jones in Art Press n°199 : "I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and no-one should think he has a better or a worse picture than anyone else. And if the 'original picture' is good, they're all good."
[Q] From William B McMillan: “Do you know the origin and spelling of the police slang word pronounced skel (often heard on ABC’s NYPD Blue TV show in the USA) which seems to be used to refer to street crooks, thugs, or con men.”
Martha Stewart is perhaps not the first person one would associate with architect Gordon Bunshaft, the principal of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Responsible for such masterworks as the the Lever House (1952) and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (1960), Bunshaft may seem at odds with the Colonial revival coziness popularized by Stewart's magazines and television programs.
Yet when the architect's own home, Travertine House, was up for sale in 1994, Stewart was evidently smitten. "I'd never seen the house," she told Brendan Gill of The New Yorker upon buying the structure in 1995, adding that the minute she had heard of it, "I wanted it—just like that!"
This unlikely love-at-first-sight scenario ended last summer with the sale and demolition of the house, a rare domestic project of the architect that had been described as one of the country's most beautiful International-style structures.
Built in 1962 as Bunshaft's home, Travertine House was a symmetrical, single-story structure 26 feet wide by 100 feet long that balanced stone-walled pavilions on either side of a central glass-walled core. Incorporating double-T pre-stressed concrete roof panels also employed in Bunshaft's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. (1974), the house was designed to display his significant collection of modern art, which included works by Giacometti, Dubuffet, and Miro, situated throughout the house's interior and 2.4-acre grounds.
Travertine was "an important Modernist house, unique in Bunshaft's career," says architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who points out that it was a notable design even by the standards of the architecturally distinguished Georgica Pond area of the Hamptons, on Long Island.
Willed to the Museum of Modern Art along with the architect's art collection after Bunshaft's death in 1990, the house was sold to Stewart for $3.2 million in 1995 without any protective covenants beyond what a MoMA spokeswoman, quoted by the East Hampton Star in 2002 referred to as an offer "to maintain the integrity" of the building.
Despite these seemingly exemplary intentions, Stewart hired London architect John Pawson to redo the two-bedroom house. Interior partitions and detailing were removed and windows boarded up; a portion of the house's signature travertine floor was reportedly removed and installed in the kitchen of Stewart's new Bedford, N.Y., home—a perhaps more typically "Martha" complex of New England saltbox-inspired architecture.
The renovation was halted, however, when Stewart began feuding with neighbor Harry Macklowe, a real-estate developer who contested Stewart's plans to build several outbuildings, claiming they would block his view of the pond. The property was soon entangled in lawsuits and rumors. Meanwhile, piles of dirt and rubble from excavations on the site were left on the lawn of Travertine House for so long that, according to visitors, they sprouted weeds.
The two-year-long dispute was finally settled in 2003. Macklowe's appeals were dismissed, and Stewart was granted permission to renovate the studio and add three outbuildings to the property. However, these projects were never restarted, and the house, which Stewart had reportedly never spent a night in, fell into further decay. (Stewart's publicist did not return requests for information; MoMA confirmed the dates of the sale but declined to comment.)
Soon after the ImClone insider-trading scandal broke, Stewart transferred the property to her daughter, Alexis, who then put the deteriorated house on the market for $10.5 million. Last spring, Donald Maharam, a textiles magnate noted for reissues of classic mid-century designs, purchased the waterfront house for approximately $9.5 million.
Despite his interest in modernism, Maharam announced that he was going to demolish the house. In a statement released in June, Maharam described the structure as "decrepit and largely beyond repair," claiming that Stewart's attempts at renovation had ended with "substantial demolition of all but the existing roof." Travertine House was demolished on the last weekend of July.
In a neighborhood where new houses are normally up to five times the size of Travertine House, Maharam's plans for a new house are restrained by zoning ordinances that prevent new construction from exceeding the Bunshaft building's original footprint unless they are set back an additional 150 feet from nearby protected wetlands—an impossibility given the shape of the property. Maharam has decided to construct a modern building "in the spirit of the former house."
Local preservationists, who had been optimistic about the house given Stewart's apparent commitment, are still asking how such a significant structure could have been allowed to deteriorate. Krinsky says that the house was more important as an ensemble work when considered with the art collection and landscape: "There wasn't much left to preserve."
But Michael Gotkin, director of the Modern Architecture Working Group, doubts Maharam's assessment of the building as unsalvageable. "Donald Maharam has made a small fortune by reviving mid-century modern designers like Alexander Girard and Irving Harper … it's too bad that he did not have the same regard for Gordon Bunshaft."
Tom Killian, who worked with Bunshaft, criticizes MoMA for not attempting to protect the house as part of its sale to Stewart, pointing out that the house was left to MoMA. "Whatever the Maharams and Ms. Stewart may have done, I feel that the museum is the real culprit."
Whoever is to blame, it's clear that the house's loss is "another blow against Modernism's sense of modesty and direction and focus," Goldberger says. "I hope the new design will not be another situation where this tradition is sacrificed."