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On America’s earliest highways, road signs were hand-painted on wood. When interstate highways became standardized, so did the typeface. But in all sorts of conditions it still looks fuzzy. Graphic designer Don Meeker helped bring highway signage back into focus.

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roadside architecture

via lisa
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geostationary banana over texas

via mr bc
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The East Village has been dragged up-market, but isn’t going without a fight. The photographer and videographer Clayton Patterson has documented the changes since he came here from Calgary, Alberta, in 1979. Mr. Patterson, also the editor of “Resistance,” a sprawling collection of essays on the contentious politics of East Village real estate, recently took me on a tour.

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The architect Andrew Geller gazed up at the beach house's soaring glass windows, the walls that angle inward, the catwalk jutting toward the ocean, and marveled.

"I'll be damned, it's still here," he says.

Geller, now 83, had gained fame in the '50s and '60s for small and startling modern beach houses that set cubes on edge, angles atilt and conventions aside. Now, on the day after Labor Day with a sky as blue and bright as anyone visiting a beach house could wish for, he had come to visit this house built on a high sandy hill in the Pines on Fire Island in 1961. Known as the Frank House, it had just undergone a three-year renovation by its current owner, Philip Monaghan, 52, working with architect Rodman Paul, who restored it to its original form.

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spgg
steve parrino is in the midst of a big posthmous comeback
marq
"the black mark", Palate of Tokyo, 13, avenue of President Wilson, 75116 Paris, 01 47 23 54 01, www.palaisdetokyo.com, of May 24 at August 26

III: Steven Parrino, 13 Shatterd Panels for Joey Cleans, 2001, panels of placoplâtre, Collection Parrino Family, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York


nickas discusses the situation in the september issue of artforum


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Britons and the Irish can still down a pint of beer, walk a mile, covet an ounce of gold and eat a pound of bananas after the European Union ruled today that the countries could retain measurements dating back to the Middle Ages.

Under a previous European Union plan, Britain and Ireland would have been forced to adopt the metric system and phase out imperial measurements by 2009. But after a vociferous antimetric campaign by British skeptics and London’s tabloid press, European Union officials decided that an ounce of common sense (or 28.3 grams) suggested that granting a reprieve was better than braving a public backlash.

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68305029
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In 1950, at 83, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a house for a private island on Lake Mahopac, about 50 miles north of New York City. He dreamed it might surpass Fallingwater, his 1935 masterpiece—but then the client ran short of funds, and the house was shelved for almost 50 years. Now, after eight years of planning and construction, the house is finally complete—5,000 spectacular square feet of mahogany, lake stone, hand-troweled cement, and triangular skylights.

But no house, least of all a posthumous construction from the twentieth century’s most famous architect, is an island, and this one has become a particularly hot piece of intellectual real estate. There are those who celebrate its realization: It’s used in the packaging of the Apple-based architecture software that helped bring the design to life and is the subject of an upcoming PBS documentary. And there are its haters: architects, scholars, and amateurs who say it’s not Wright’s real vision—the stones jut too much, the skylights should be flat, not domed, and so on. As it stands, the house is officially unofficial. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s chief executive officer, Philip Allsopp, states bluntly, “It’s not a Frank Lloyd Wright house, because it hasn’t been certified by the foundation.”

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"quiet" night


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35 years of construction in 10 seconds

via vz
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For the last three years a team of engineers, conservators and architects has been studying the guts of the Guggenheim, mapping out a thorough but respectful renovation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling building on Fifth Avenue, completed in 1959. Although it was clearly in serious need of renewal, with cracks in its facade, a decaying sidewalk and outdated mechanical systems, experts wanted to make a comprehensive diagnosis before determining the best course of treatment.

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Yesterday at the flea market I picked up a small cosmetics case stuffed with photos almost all of which were of the same woman. The bulk of the photos were photobooths and portraits documenting her as she aged over the course of about 50 years or so. I'll probably eventually put them all up over at Square America but until then here's a bunch- the dates where available are underneath each photo. Given the date of the first photo I figure she was born in late 1937 or early 1938. The last photo dates from the early 90s so she's somewhere in her early-to-mid 50s there.
via mr bc
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hill country

via adman
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harlan howard

wiki: Born in Detroit, Michigan, he began writing country music at a young age. After serving as a paratrooper with the United States Army, he went to Los Angeles, California, hoping to sell his music. He did manual labor while writing songs and pushing his finished material. Eventually he sold some of his compositions and, after a few minor successes, his song, Pick Me Up on Your Way Down, recorded by Charlie Walker, went to No. 2 on the country music charts in late 1958. A year later Ray Price had a major country hit with "Heartaches By The Number"; simultaneously a pop version of the song performed by Guy Mitchell went to No. 1 on the Pop Charts. Buoyed by these two major hits, Howard moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1960. Bringing along a large portfolio of compositions, he signed a contract with Acuff-Rose Music. Howard's songs were so immediately successful that in 1961 alone he had fifteen of his compositions on the country music charts, earning himself ten BMI awards. Among his biggest hits was "I Fall to Pieces," co-written with Hank Cochran and recorded by Patsy Cline. He also wrote the classic Kingston Trio song "Everglades", and the song "Busted", a hit for both Ray Charles and Johnny Cash.

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john schwarz after calder no. 6


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eau de horse sweat

eau de play doh

bacon salt

via vz
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Inside New York's First and Most Ornate Subway Station, Closed Since 1945


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One of Miami Beach's oldest houses was partially demolished this summer, prompting more debate over what's left of the single-story coral structure built c. 1915.

On July 9, owner Michael Stern bulldozed a 1939 addition to the Avery Smith House with the city's approval. Stern and co-owner Ivor Rose want to build a four-story building on the site.

"By no means is [the fight] over," says Mitch Novick, owner of a nearby hotel and former chairman of the city's historic preservation board.

The city's historic preservation board on June 12 approved Stern and Rose's plans to raze not only the addition, but a Mediterranean revival building and coral-rock garage on the site. The board said the owners can demolish the Avery Smith House if it is not structurally sound or able to be restored. If Stern and Rose demolish it, Miami Beach preservation laws say they must build a replica.

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frosty myers the wall


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quirk you


We’re drowning in quirk. It is the ruling sensibility of today’s Gen-X indie culture, defined territorially by the gentle ministrations of public radio’s This American Life; the strenuously odd (and now canceled) TV sitcom Arrested Development; the movies of Wes Anderson; Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s Web site; the performance art, music, and writing of Miranda July; and the just-too-wacky-to-be-fully-believable memoirs of Augusten Burroughs.

It’s been 20 years of beneficent, wide-eyed gazing upon the oddities of our fellow man. David Byrne probably birthed contemporary quirk around 1985— halfway between his “Psycho Killer” beginnings with the Talking Heads and his move to global pop—when he sang the song “Stay Up Late”: “Cute, cute, little baby / Little pee-pee, little toes.” (As it happens, Byrne appeared on July’s recent book tour.) Jon Cryer’s “Duckie” Dale in Pretty in Pink came a year later, and quirk was on its way.

As an aesthetic principle, quirk is an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream. It features mannered ingenuousness, an embrace of small moments, narrative randomness, situationally amusing but not hilarious character juxtapositions (on HBO’s recent indie-cred comedy Flight of the Conchords, the titular folk-rock duo have one fan), and unexplainable but nonetheless charming character traits. Quirk takes not mattering very seriously.

Quirk is odd, but not too odd. That would take us all the way to weird, and there someone might get hurt. Napoleon Dynamite became a quirk classic by making heroes of Napoleon and Pedro, boy-men without qualities who team up against an alpha blonde to elect Mexican- immigrant Pedro class president at an Idaho high school. Napoleon seals the deal with a dance so transfixingly, transportingly wrong that it becomes a kind of deus ex machina. Pedro wins. (Indeed, inappropriate dancing is a big quirk trope, inasmuch as it provides a dramatic moment at which value systems can collide. See, for example, 7-year-old Olive’s unwittingly hypersexualized routine to Rick James’s “Super Freak” that brings the dysfunctional family together in last year’s Little Miss Sunshine. This itself called out to the unwittingly only-slightly-less-hypersexualized preteen dance troupe Sparkle Motion in the 2001 quirk-noir Donnie Darko, a movie in which Jake Gyllenhaal takes orders from a giant rabbit.)

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big blue and you


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rick rubin


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1st dibs


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