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live music ~ vault radio
Bill Graham and his concert promotion company, Bill Graham Presents, produced more than 35,000 concerts all over the world. His first venue, the legendary Fillmore Auditorium, was home to many of rock's greatest performers - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Prince - and the list goes on and on.
Graham taped thousands of live performances and stored the tapes in the basement of the BGP headquarters.
These tapes and the concerts they captured lay dormant until the Bill Graham archive was acquired by Wolfgang's Vault (Bill Graham's given first name was Wolfgang) in 2003.
Vault Radio is now playing selected tracks from these concerts in an FM-quality, 128K digital radio stream. Songs will be added to and removed from the radio show on a regular basis. We will be broadcasting unaltered live performance music from many of the greatest bands of the last 40 years. The music you hear on Vault Radio has not been sweetened or polished. You'll be listening to what the band played that night - nothing more, nothing less.
streaming for free now w/ plans to sell downloads later this year.
rat rod report
1968 convertible corvette
White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.
But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have found.
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.
On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin is available online for free
FREE THE PEOPLE!
pinks
Bulldozers may start demolishing flood-damaged houses in New Orleans as soon as this month, but the city won't be razing as many as it planned to in December.This is a most promising development.
Preservationists are taking a closer look at a list of red-tagged buildings in New Orleans that the city says are in immediate danger of collapse.
Last month, the city's historic landmarks commission asked the National Trust's New Orleans Field Office and the Preservation Resource Center to inspect the 1,957 houses on a list that was made public last month after a lawsuit settlement. Most of the damaged houses are located in the Ninth Ward.
In the last three weeks, volunteers—architectural historians and other qualified inspectors—have identified about 100 that they say should not be demolished. The city's list of "red-rated" buildings was 5,500, and the recently published list was the "worst of the worst," says Walter Gallas, director of the New Orleans Field Office.
"We looked at properties that were in National Register and local historic districts that were in this initial list," Gallas says. "We started from this list of 5,500, but that number has been whittled down."
The Trust plans to act as a consultant with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the Section 106 review process, which is required before a federal agency can raze a National Register-listed historic resource.
"When requests for demolition come down, the Trust and Preservation Resource Center will be consulted," Gallas says. "It's just one part of the work we're doing."
To settle a lawsuit, the city agreed on Jan. 17 to notify owners of houses it wants to demolish in 30 days—in a letter, in an ad in the Times-Picayune, and on the newspaper's Web site. Homeowners will also be able to challenge the city's assessment. The lawsuit was filed over 120 Ninth Ward houses that were obstructing sidewalks and roads.
The city last month began notifying homeowners of impending demolitions, so according to the agreement, it can demolish those structures this month.
being jane jacobs via blowhard
more on JJ via robert silvey
frozen smoke
Brookings Findings
Days Since Katrina Made Landfall: 156
Now over five months since Katrina made landfall, New Orleans is home to over 130,000 people, including a much larger than expected population of college students. But, the city lacks enough essential services to support all of these returning residents, and the area continues to hemorrhage workers. What key trends were available this month for the states suggest little progress in both Louisiana and Mississippi.
[...]
The slow pace of recovery on fundamentals strongly suggests that the city and state will be unable to restore essential services on their own, and require direct federal assistance to do so. Meanwhile, the well being of the nearly 750,000 households that remain displaced by Katrina is essentially not known. With New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mississippi still facing massive economic and infrastructural challenges, it is likely that many of these households will need federal assistance for many months to come.
Why wireless Internet in Louisiana and New Orleans? Why is it so important for the citizens around the state?
Bayoubuzz asked the Chief Technology Officer, Greg Meffert to explain the needs of New Orleans and why it is so important to the State of Louisiana. Currently, the City of New Orleans is backing legislation that is on the Governor’s call to allow cities build or deploy wireless Internet systems for its citizens.
As we discovered during the very last hurricane season, there was a complete and total communications breakdown in areas throughout Louisiana. Each parish would be allowed to opt-in as to whether it wants to make wireless Internet available to its citizens.
sunny david aka roy hall
In the summer of 1954 Elvis Presley came to Roy Hall's club looking for work. Roy recalled; "I fired him after just that one night. He weren't no damn good." Towards the end of that same year another young man came to the club looking for work. He was Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy kept him on for a few weeks. Roy hired Jerry for $15 a night. They did a lot of duets together. It was also in 1954 that Roy Hall and a black musician named Dave Williams took a trip to the Everglades that resulted in one of the classic rock 'n' roll songs;
Twenty-one drums and an ol' bass horn
Somebody beatin' on a ding-dong
Come on over baby, whole lotta shakin'goin' on
Come on over baby, baby, you can't go wrong
There ain't no fakin', whole lotta shakin'goin' on
Well I said shake baby shake
I said shake baby shake
I said shake it baby shake it
I said shake baby shake
Come on over Whole lot of shakin goin' on
Ahhhhh Lets Go !!!
Piano Solo Guitar Solo
Verse
Weary old faiths make art while hot young sects make only trouble. Insincerity, or at least familiarity, seems to be a precondition of great religious art—the wheezing and worldly Renaissance Papacy produced the Sistine ceiling, while the young Apostolic Church left only a few scratched graffiti in the catacombs In America, certainly, very little art has attached itself directly to our own dazzling variety of sects and cults, perhaps because true belief is too busy with eternity to worry about the décor. The great exception is the Shakers who managed, throughout the hundred or so years of their flourishing, to make objects as magically austere that they continue to astonish our eyes and our sense of form long after the last Shakers stopped shaking. Everything that they touched is breathtaking in its beauty and simplicity. It is not a negative simplicity, either a simplicity of gewgaws eliminated and ornament excised, which, like that of distressed object found in a barn, appeals by accident to modern eyes trained already in the joys of minimalism. No, their objects show knowing, creative, shaping simplicity, and to look at a single Shaker box is to see as attenuated asymmetry, a slender, bendin eccentricity, which truly anticipates and rivals the bending organic sleekness of Brancusi’s “Bird in Flight” or the algorithmic logic of Bauhaus spoons and forks. Shaker objects don’t look simple; they look specifically Shaker.
[...]
It is here, ironically, in the need to make things to sell to other people, that the first stirrings of a distinct style begin. This is not to say that the objects were made insincerely, or that Shakerism in design was a scam. The built-in cupboards and chairs and ladders constructed only for other Shakers, in Shaker communities, are made in the same spirit as the things for sale. The point is that no line was drawn the other way around, either: what was made for sale looked like what was made for sacred. The urge to make consumer goods is, after all, one of the keenest spiritual disciplines that an ascetic can face: it forces spirit to take form. An ascetic drinking tea from a cup decides not to care what kind of cup he’s drinking from; an ascetic forced to make a cup has to ask what kind of cup he ought to drink from. By the mid-nineteenth century, “Shaker” had become a brand name.
The checks Bultman writes are allocated only to those who work, which these days in New Orleans can mean performing at a club in front of a handful of Federal Emergency Management Agency workers.
On many nights, money from the door is minimal or nonexistent. Bultman hopes her $100 subsidy is enough to dissuade someone from taking a gig in another city. If instruments and artifacts from the city's musical heritage were washed away, then New Orleans' soul -- the musicians who define it -- must stay.
"As the time wore on," Bultman says, "more and more musicians who were dumped all over the country wanted to come back. We soon realized that this is really about giving people instruments and giving people hope, and that's when we started paying the gig fees."
Two months ago, Bultman, a writer/historian and the co-founder of the New Orleans Musicians' Clinic, was urging displaced musicians to return to the city. She started the clinic with her husband in 1998 with the assistance of Dr. Jack B. McConnell, the developer of Tylenol tablets whose son, Page, played keyboards for the band Phish. With a mix of pride and a dedication to preserving a music culture that she says "percolates out of the ground," Bultman hoped all New Orleans' evacuees would soon be returning.
'NEW ORLEANS IS NOT A HEALTHY PLACE'
Reality, however, soon sunk in, and now she is not so sure. "The goal was to get everyone we could get back to New Orleans," she says. "Now that we're back, we've moved away from that. We've moved away from the fantasy that everything would go back to the way it was. New Orleans is just not a healthy place for everyone to come to."
After four years of public debates, political infighting, posturing and stalled momentum in the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan, the next five weeks promise to be among the most critical since the towers fell.
Gov. George E. Pataki set the stage for a March 14 showdown at ground zero shortly before Christmas when he gave the developer Larry A. Silverstein 90 days to work out his longstanding differences with the Port Authority over the rebuilding process.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg upped the ante recently in language certain to incite the developer, when he called on him to set aside his financial interests and "do the right thing": cede two proposed buildings and a major portion of the site to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey so that rebuilding can go more quickly.
[...]
"It's long overdue, but very welcome," Mr. Yaro said. "Ending up with a see-through Freedom Tower and the rest of the site vacant, while the developer gets a half billion in his pocket and the public is stuck with billions in obligations, doesn't sound like a particularly attractive outcome."
shipping container news
remember those black countertops in science lab classes? i thought it might make a good alternative to $45 sf honed black granite or dark slate or black dupont corian. turns out its made for home applications already and is marketed as durcon a molded epoxy resin.
But New Orleans' poor homeowners will lose even more if they rashly invest in fixing up homes that will later be deemed uninsurable or are in neighborhoods so sparsely populated they can't get police, water or electricity service. If these residents hold out only a few months more, they can make better decisions about what to do.
Local and federal government, on the other hand, must move fast to make sure the city is inhabitable for low-income citizens. The federal government urgently needs to craft a measure like the one proposed by Rep. Richard H. Baker, R-La. Baker's proposal would allow homeowners to sell their ruined homes to a state development corporation and help them move to safer areas.
President Bush, in a speech from New Orleans' then-deserted Jackson Square, promised the nation that New Orleans would be rebuilt, but the White House has inexplicably withheld its support for Baker's proposal. Does the president intend for the federal government to finance the replacement of every destroyed house where it stood? If not, how will the rebuilding of New Orleans be accomplished?
New Orleans, meanwhile, needs to gather information. How many displaced people wish to come home? How many would live elsewhere if their old neighborhoods are unlivable or dangerously situated? How might they rebuild social networks? Gathering answers to these questions will jump-start the city's ability to offer utilities where needed and make crucial decisions about rebuilding plans.
Every day the line snakes down a spartan corridor on the eighth floor of City Hall here, as hundreds of people clutch a piece of paper inscribed with a fateful percentage that could force them to abandon their home.
The number is always over 50, and it means a house was so damaged in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina — more than half-ruined — that it faces demolition, unless the owner can come up with tens of thousands of dollars to raise it several feet above the ground and any future floodwaters.
But there is a way out, and that is why so many people stand in line every day, collectively transforming this half-ruined city. "What you need to do is talk to a building inspector and get that lowered below 50 percent," a city worker calls out to the crowd. And at the end of the line, in a large open room down the hall, that is exactly what happens, nearly 90 percent of the time, New Orleans officials say.
By agreeing so often to these appeals — more than 6,000 over the last few months — city officials are in essence allowing random redevelopment to occur throughout the city, undermining a plan by Mayor C. Ray Nagin's rebuilding commission to hold off on building permits in damaged areas for several months until more careful planning can take place. That plan, greeted by widespread opposition, including from the mayor himself, is now essentially dead.
House by house, in devastated neighborhoods across the city, homeowners are bringing back their new-minted building permits and rebuilding New Orleans. As many as 500 such permits are issued every day, said Greg Meffert, the city official in charge of the rebuilding process.
And there is no particular rhyme or reason to who gets a permit, or consideration of whether their neighborhoods can really support its previous residents. One city building inspector, Devra Goldstein, called the proceedings on the eighth floor "really fly-by-night, chaotic, Wild West, get-what-you-want."
The floor, she said, represents "a plan by default."
It is also testament to the fierce desire of many displaced New Orleanians to re-establish themselves, no matter the odds.
hey joe!
Mr. Liddy's complaint about police tactics, while hardly novel from a big-city protester, stands out because of his job: He is a New York City police officer. The rallies he attended were organized in the summer of 2004 by his union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, to protest the pace of contract talks with the city.
Now the officers, through their union, are suing the city, charging that the police procedures at their demonstrations — many of them routinely used at war protests, antipoverty marches and mass bike rides — were so heavy-handed and intimidating that their First Amendment rights were violated.
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was."
Milan Kundera, The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting.
This quote opens the second chapter of Robert Bevan's timely and original book The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. As Bevan says, the destruction of symbolic buildings and the physical fabric of cities and civilisations is not merely collateral damage, but a deliberate intention by the attacker, to "dominate, divide, terrorise, and eliminate" the memory, history and identity of the opposing side. Cultural cleansing is inextricably linked to ethnic cleansing, genocide and holocausts.
Arranged thematically more than chronologically, the book shows the political forces at work that led to targeted destruction beyond military requirements, from the Roman erasure of Carthage in 146 BC, the elimination of the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and their cities, to the "murdering" of aristocrats' houses during the French Revolution. But it is the 20th century leading into the 21st that is examined with forensic insight. From Guernica to Dresden, China's continuing "Sinification" of Tibet, Cambodia and the Yugoslav war, few countries escape the culpability of physical and cultural genocide.