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regular angry mob or inside the beltway villagers?

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friends of loews jersey city


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If you’re nodding in recognition, you’re a lucky owner of George Leonard Herter’s farrago “Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices” — one of the greatest oddball masterpieces in this or any other language. A surly sage, gun-toting Minnesotan and All-American crank — the kind of guy who would take his own sandwiches to Disneyland because the restaurants were No Damned Good — Herter wrote books on such disparate topics as candy making, marriage advice, African safaris and household cleaning.

Where could you find these books? Not in any fancy bookstore, friend. No, you needed a Herter’s sporting goods catalog. Starting in 1937 from atop his father’s dry-goods shop in Waseca, Minn., Herter over the next four decades built a mail-order sporting goods juggernaut. The arrival of the Herter’s catalog was like Christmas with bullets. Need a bird’s-eye maple gunstock? Check. How about a Herter’s Famous Raccoon Death Cry Call? Just two dollars. Fiberglass canoes? Got you covered. The catalog, which the former Waseca printer Wayne Brown recalls started as three-ring binder supplements, grew so popular — about 400,000 or 500,000 copies per run, he estimates — that Brown Printing became one of the country’s largest commercial printers.
via vz
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atompunk

thanks lisa
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awnings

thanks tom
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A7 NYHC reunion


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The Peerless Tool Chest of H. O. Studley

thanks justin / more from wikipedia
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The origin of the surf t-shirt, or "surfer t-shirt" if you prefer, can be traced back to Europe in the early 20th century. During World War I, U.S. soldiers noticed that European troops were wearing comfortable, lightweight cotton undershirts in the hot summer months. It didn't take long for the Americans--who were wearing heavy wool uniforms--to catch on. Because of the simple shape that resembles the letter "T", these undershirts soon became known to Americans as "t-shirts".

At about this time surfing was enjoying its first renaissance in Hawaii. Surfing had been popular with Hawaiian natives until missionaries showed up in the mid-19th century. They disapproved of surfing and consequently, most natives had given it up by 1890. But thanks to guys like Duke Kahanamoku and other early surfers like George Freeth, the sport was re-born. We all know Duke as the father of modern surfing, and Freeth is credited with introducing the sport to Southern California in 1907

But the t-shirt was still considered underwear, and it took such Hollywood notables as James Dean, John Wayne and Marlon Brando to help change that. In 1951, Brando shocked moviegoers when his t-shirt was ripped off his chest in A Streetcar Named Desire. A few years later, the t-shirt became not only accepted as a stand alone outer garment, but actually very cool when James Dean starred in A Rebel Without A Cause.

In Matt Warshaw's Encyclopedia of Surfing credit is given to Gordon & Smith for having invented the surfer t-shirt. To promote his new brand of surfboards in 1961, Floyd Smith of Surfboards by Gordon and Smith invited local surfers to bring white t-shirts into his San Diego surf shop. There, he had the now-familiar Gordon and Smith logo screened on the t-shirt backs at no charge. Everyone owned several white t-shirts in the early '60s. The surf culture was gaining popularity and many wanted to be identified with it, whether they surfed or not..
surf links
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danceteria club posters

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Bringing Brutal Back. Can restoring Paul Rudolph's signature building rescue the architect's reputation as well?


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I forget just how I stumbled upon David Hoffman's 1962 film Bluegrass Roots, which was the first authoritative documentary on the subject. Top left is a segment of the doc, which features plenty of clogging (really! this style was called clogging!) and old timey playin'. The documentary gives a lot of weight to the elderly "Appalachian Minstrel", Bascom Lamar Lunsford, whom you'll see dancing with his wife about four and half minutes in. Lunsford had already been filmed about 30 years earlier, however, in a scene featured in The Times Ain't Like They Used To Be, a too-good-to-be-true folk video compilation with performances from 1928 to 1935. The DVD is in print but if, as with these depression era performers, hard times have got you in a squeeze, all the contents are on youtube. Top right is that clip of Lunsford's band with a cool introduction in which Lunsford hilariously obsesses about gettin' first prize in some music contest.

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rip odetta

Her hope to sing at the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama had helped keep her alive for weeks when medical experts had despaired of her prospects for survival, Yeager said.


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work chairs at workalicious

im talking to you dave.
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The Empire State Building archive, which includes more than 500 items, is going on sale at the Wright auction house in Chicago on December 11. Wright’s low estimate for the collection, which includes elevation renderings, working drawings, models and maquettes, and other ephemera, is $470,000. The drawings of the building, arguably one of the most recognized in the world and the most loved in New York, had been stored at the homes of the last partners of the successor firm of Shreve Lamb & Harmon, the firm that designed the building. The office closed in 1995, having never surpassed the glory of the 1931 tower. The partners declined to be named.

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In February 1958 they announced plans to re-establish the Irish Georgian Society, a group that had created a photographic record of Dublin’s best Georgian buildings earlier in the century; this new version, Mr. Guinness wrote in The Irish Times, would “fight for the protection of what is left of Georgian architecture in Ireland.” The following month they began restoring a building of their own, Leixlip Castle, a dilapidated 12th-century fortress on 182 acres west of Dublin, which would be their home and the group’s headquarters.

Now observing its 50th year with a series of celebrations and a lavishly illustrated book, the revived Irish Georgian Society has been credited with restoring dozens of architectural gems across Ireland, from a former union hall for Dublin tailors to the country’s oldest Palladian house. (The society’s early preservation efforts focused on Georgian Dublin, but in later years it expanded its mission to cover noteworthy buildings from any period.) Perhaps more impressively, the group has helped bring about a national change of heart regarding Irish architecture.

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repurposing closed box-store boxes


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Lu-Mi-Num company bikes of St. Louis

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A growing number of Steve McGreens are souping up their gas-electric hybrids to make them go faster and handle better, while delivering stellar fuel economy. It isn't just gearheads busting their knuckles, either. A lot of the hybrid hackers are tech geeks whose innovations may well appear in the cars we'll buy tomorrow.

"The gearhead of today has evolved. People today want performance and fuel economy," Paul Goldman, the 46-year-old CEO of the hot-rod hybrid shop Juiced Hybrid, tells Wired.com. He sells more than 500 items ranging from suspension kits and chassis stiffeners to body kits and floor mats. Most of his customers are "educated people who care about the environment" and modify their cars "because they're tech savvy, not necessarily because they're car savvy."

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Coming in late on this discussion. Catherine Spaeth, please get over yourself. Three posts on your blog about this peccadillo you discovered and all your words here in Johnson’s comments are just too much. Publishing “the plagiarist’s” picture under the blog title “_____ the Plagiarist,” it’s just melodramatic overkill.

I’m not sure that what you’re griping about (and griping, and griping…) is even properly plagiarism. As you describe it, a blogger used some of your words but “sapped your writing of all its critical bite in order to provide comparatively glowing fodder.”

That’s two different issues. If he changed your meaning but attributed the words to you, that’s one thing. Using your words verbatim and passing them off as his is another. It seems like the sins somewhat cancel each other out. I’m sure you can lecture me endlessly about why this is not so.

Cribbing others’ prose is wrong. Unfortunately the Internet is still an intellectual Wild West, and people do all kinds of things on the fly that won’t live up to your ethical standards as a print writer. You are the schoolmaster insisting on decorum while others are ducking from the hail of bullets as the bad guys ride into town. Point out your grievance, move on. No one cares how important you think you are.

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global warming swimming pool


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more swiped net junk

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My original effort was an attempt to understand how Whistler’s vision of the Thames, which is mostly represented horizontally in his paintings, was translated into representations of the vertical reach of New York City. The darkness and mist that covers the bridges and the far shore of the Thames revealed to Whistler an abstract and elemental formal quality that was instrumental in making his art so revolutionary—a deliberate arrangement of colors and shapes on a flat surface. As soon as photographers began looking at the vertical geography of New York, they began to see ways they could capture the unusual forms by covering details in the same cloak of darkness.

Whistler wasn’t afraid to make enemies or to go to court (as in the famous lawsuit against John Ruskin) to demand that he be recognized as a revolutionary artist who had showed urban citizens something they had never seen before. He even compiled his rebuttals to his critics in a book called The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. His influence extended beyond the realm of the visual arts; for example, when Ezra Pound was trying to promote Imagism in London in the second decade of the twentieth century, he cited Whistler’s courageous artwork in support of his ideas. Returning to the visual arts, even so brash and semiabstract a painter as Joseph Stella, whose sharp angles seem distinct from Whistler’s delicacy of touch, also began his career as a maker of Whistleresque nocturnes.

It can be said that Whistler showed people how to paint a “moonlight” (his original term for what he later called nocturnes) without ever depicting the moon. This, coupled with the increasing ubiquity of artificial light, helped liberate the representation of night from a number of qualities that had become clichéd, most notably that it was a time of reflection and pastoral repose that would carry us back to childlike innocence.

But of course the book is not all about Whistler. The motif of the flaneur runs throughout. I try to show that Edgar Allan Poe had partly celebrated and partly parodied this figure in his story “The Man of the Crowd.” What he notices is that the flaneur can’t really make anything happen; his whole job is to observe and comment. But beginning in the late nineteenth century, the flaneur becomes an investigator. Think of Jacob Riis who was dedicated not just to observing the world but also to changing what he saw.

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New Media vs Artists with Computers

Abigail Solomon Godeau


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used wood burning stoves phil pa area


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