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mingering mike
When criminal investigator and part-time DJ Dori Hadar stumbled across hand-painted LP sleeves containing cardboard "records," he knew he had to find out more about the artist. The result is his book, "Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar." (This story first aired on WNYC's Studio 360.)
fleeting expletives
If President Bush and Vice President Cheney can blurt out vulgar language, then the government cannot punish broadcast television stations for broadcasting the same words in similarly fleeting contexts.
Two years after arriving at Nanterre, Jean [Baudrillard] was thrown into the most momentous event in recent French history—May ’68. Many people who take him simply for a dandy or a cynic forget the significance of these weeks of intense fever and utopia suddenly realized, which he experienced firsthand. It was all the more powerful since no one had thought it possible. For a while he became an activist, even a Maoist, but it did not take him long to realize that the same media that had snowballed the Paris events around the rest of the country, bringing General de Gaulle to his knees, had also brought about the sudden deflation that followed. Nevertheless, May ’68 remained for him one of the extraordinary occasions when signs assume a singular meaning—a radical event up there with the attacks on the World Trade Center. May ’68 and the twin towers were both far more formidable in their abrupt disappearance than they ever were in actuality. Indeed, after the latter event, Jean claimed that architecture had lost its ability to define space or acquire symbolic power. Architecture had nothing left to express beyond its own flat functionality, and he notoriously concluded that only those buildings that deserve to be destroyed are worth erecting.
cistern swimming pool (liners)
drinking images
East Village Meatshop Kurowycky's Shuttering
Sion Misrahi has revamped the Lower East Side, helping to transform old storefronts around Orchard Street into trendy businesses, but not everyone is impressed with the changes.
But the company owned by C. C. Myers, a 6-foot-5 contractor who favors peacock cowboy boots, fixed the mangled freeway so fast that some residents have recalibrated their respect for the California Department of Transportation, which hired him.
The state estimated that repairs to the 165-foot-long ramp between Interstates 80 and 580 would take 50 days and cost $5.2 million. For every day short of the June 26 deadline, it promised a $200,000 bonus, not to exceed a total of $5 million. The highest bid came in at $6.4 million. Mr. Myers’s company, C. C. Myers Inc., won with the lowest bid — $867,075 — and completed the project in 17 days, winning the full $5 million.
rago modern furniture, (art, ceramics, etc) auction / no minimums / june 9th 11 am
yeah, id wear it
As part of the new Bauhaus permanent exhibit in Dessau, Germany, the historic home of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee is surprisingly sparse. Aside from a few photos of the middle-aged artists posing with rakish smiles, the unadorned, recently refurbished building where they once lived and worked serves as a testament to the movement's functional "design for living" philosophy. Nestled among pine trees alongside the half-dozen other Masters' Houses that architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius built in the 1920s, the angular building features sprawling windows, spacious workshops, wine-red floors and pastel-green stairwells. It is the radiant symbol of an avant-garde movement whose activity was cut short—and one that people are now clamoring to rediscover.
my brother john has had the bug to get a silver western style cowboy belt buckle for ages. hes been checking the local flee markets and not finding the one. he just scored on ebay.
Alternately girlish and demonic, they merged popular culture, personal fantasy, history and current, often violent events and fell under the heading of scatter art, a phenomenon whose definition and membership remains a bit blurred. The artists most often identified with it — like Ms. Kilimnik, Sylvie Fleury, Cady Noland and, to some extent, Jessica Stockholder — are women, as are those artists’ most important precursors, among them Yvonne Rainer, Joan Jonas, Barbara Bloom and the photo-based generation grouped around Cindy Sherman. It could also be seen as including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jack Pierson and even Matthew Barney.
shaking all over ~ essential tremor
["The Electronic Spirit of Eric] satie [, featuring The Moog Synthesizer with The Camarata Contemporary Chamber Orchestra"] (mp3s)
don adams joke thief
great inside story on joke theft in general. but nowhere do they mention that the album cover art on "get smart!" is by mad magazine artist jack davis
In this four-minute outtake that didn’t make it into the final version of the documentary film Helvetica, designer Massimo Vignelli talks about his 1972 map of the New York subway system — which, you may recall, encountered stout opposition. Vignelli argues that, far from being too abstract, as the map’s detractors argued, his map wasn’t abstract enough: he should have left out the geographical references to waterways and parks, he thinks, leaving a blank background instead.
For the first eight episodes of Season 15, Bob Vila heads to the land of sun and fun: Miami Beach, Florida. He discovers that while most of glamorous "South Beach" has already been developed and real estate comes at a premium, there are still hot buys to be found north of the Deco District.
Just off the Venetian Causeway on a manmade island with gorgeous views of the Miami skyline and Biscayne Bay, he finds a small and very dated condo in a high-rise building and undertakes a high-style renovation. We learn about architect Morris Lapidus, the creator of the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc hotels and trendsetter for 1950's and '60s Miami Beach, and team up with the New York architectural/design team to the stars, Pierce Allen.
Bob shows how removing the popcorn ceiling and wall-to-wall carpet, knocking down walls to open up the space for today's lifestyle, and even refurbishing the existing 1960's aluminum slider and window puts this tired little apartment on the fast track into the next millennium. With glass tile, hip furnishings, custom glass pocket doors, fun curves, and a new take on using old-school products like cork flooring and laminates, this project is a breath of fresh air.
To: The Internet
From: carl@media.org for public.resource.org
Subj: smithsonianimages.si.edu
Date: May 19, 2007
We write to you today on the subject of SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu, a government ecommerce site built on a repository of 6,288 images of national significance. The site is breathtaking in scope, with imagery ranging from the historic cyanotypes of Edward Muybridge to historic photos from aviation, natural history, and many other fields. If the Smithsonian Institution is our attic, these photos are our collective scrapbook.
However, the web site imposes draconian limits on the use of this imagery. The site includes a copyright notice that to the layman would certainly discourage any use of the imagery. While personal, non-commercial use is purportedly allowed, it requires a half-dozen clicks before the user is allowed to download a low-resolution, watermarked image. An image without the watermark and at sufficient resolution to be useful requires a hefty fee, manual approval by the Smithsonian staff, and the resulting invoice specifically prohibits any further use without permission.
For some photos, the prohibitions go even farther. Aviation photos, for example, come from the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), which states, among other efforts to overreach, “even in the absence of copyright, Smithsonian still reserves all rights to image use.” Are these prohibitions on reuse valid? We showed the NASM copyright page to Yochai Benkler, a Yale law professor. Benkler wrote back that the unilateral and unequivocal claims were “nonsense on stilts.”
The Smithsonian Institution is a trust instrumentality of the United States of America chartered by the U.S. Congress to "increase and diffuse knowledge." 20 U.S.C. § 41 et seq. The Smithsonian's Board of Regents is chaired by the Chief Justice of the United States and the Institution receives over $650 million in federal funds every year.
To understand why the Smithsonian is over-reaching when it comes to photographs, one must remember that works of the U.S. government have no copyright protection whatsoever. Works of the United States Government are in the public domain. 17 U.S.C. § 105 While there are subtle exceptions, such as work prepared by private contractors exempted under special exemptions established in the Federal Acquisition Regulations ( FAR 52.227-14), the general principle is quite clear and applies just as much to the Smithsonian Institution as to any other part of our federal government. As Rachell V. Browne, Assistant General Counsel of the Smithsonian Institution said in a statement submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office:
“The Smithsonian cannot own copyright in works prepared by Smithsonian employees paid from federal funds.”
The Institution makes a great show of the distinction between “federal” employees and “trust” employees. But, this distinction is based on an obscure 1962 non-binding opinion [Application for Registration of Claim to Copyright Protection of Publication Entitled “The White House - An Historic Guide,” Op. Off. Legal Counsel (October 26, 1962)]. As a matter of policy it is difficult to conceive of two Smithsonians, a federal institution accountable to the American people and an ironically named "trust" somehow allowed to act as a private, opaque body accountable to only the whims of management. Even if one is to carve off a “private trust” with different rules from those that apply to agencies of the U.S. government, one must remember that the trust is registered under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS Code and is thus required to perform actions that directly promote the declared charitable purpose, which in this case is to “increase and diffuse knowledge.”
Because the overwhelming majority of the images in SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu appear to be public domain, and because the draconian notices on the site have a dramatic chilling effect on use of these historic images and national symbols, we have performed several actions that we hope will allow others to examine the public domain status: continue
i suppose this guy thinks hes helping. what a knucklehead :
For a small city, St. Louis has an extraordinarily rich history of modernist architecture. Isadore Shank, William Adair Bernoudy, Harris Armstrong, Frederick Dunn, Charles Nagel, Ralph Cole Hall, Edouard Mutrux, Hank Bauer, and Eugene Mackey were all based here at one time or other. Most of their designs -- located in the wealthier, green and leafy suburbs west of the city -- were built during the golden age of St. Louis Modernism roughly between 1930 and 1970 when status was not to be distinguished solely on the square footage of a home.
Modernism, however, got a bad name due to its association with the soulless Internationalist Style of Ludwig "Less is More" Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson and their ubiquitous glass boxes designed for an urban population of automobiles and automatons rather than residents, tourists and shoppers. Being socialists first and architects second, Johnson and Mies were concerned mainly with political and social questions -- and thus built structures that reflected their vision of a workers' paradise -- as well as academic questions such as how to express the structure of a building externally. In the process, they forgot about the poor fish who would live and work among these sterile monstrosities.
Sadly they brought the same aesthetic to their domestic buildings, and nowhere was this more evident than in Johnson's Glass House and Mies' Farnsworth House. Historian Franz Schulze noted that the latter is "more nearly temple than dwelling, and it rewards aesthetic contemplation before it fulfills domestic necessity.�
However these domestic "temples" were the exception, not the rule. Unlike Mies's skyboxes, the bulk of modernist residential architecture was warm, open and organic, commingling brick, wood, stone and glass to create a sense of serenity which blurred the distinction between "inside" and "outside." Most important, they took into account the people who would live there. And unlike today's cookie cutter mansions, they were elegant and original. Was there ever a more breathtakingly beautiful home than Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, a home built not overlooking a waterfall, but over a waterfall.
The son of modernist Richard Neutra is looking for someone to buy and protect his father's last commercial building. It has been listed for sale for $3.5 million since November.
So far, Dion Neutra has had several offers, "but none that quite hit the nail on the head," he said in an e-mail. He insists that the National Register-listed building be sold with a protective conservation easement.
Built in 1950 as Neutra's office, the 4,800-square-foot building in Silver Lake, Calif., includes two apartments in the rear. Neutra wants to sell the building to establish an endowment to allow his Los Angeles-based Neutra Institute for Survial Through Design to continue.
inflate-o-pub
via j zoller