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atomic toys


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sheet musings


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cartype car cut-aways


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There's a 1936 play by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood called The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy In Two Acts. It relates the sorry tale of one Michael Ransom, a mountaineer attempting to beat a team of rival climbers to the summit of a mountain in the Himalayas, a formidable hunk of rock. After various ill-advised shortcuts motivated by competitiveness, Ransom reaches the peak only to discover his mother sitting there waiting for him.

Auden and Isherwood's play has become a metaphor for the two-act tragedy of popular music in our time. Pitting themselves obsessively and competitively against the musicians of the past, today's rock mountaineers attempt to scale the same peaks, only to find Father Iggy or Mother Janis sitting there at the top in a rocking chair, rocking out. Regular readers of Click Opera know that I call this phenomenon "epigone pop" or "retro necro", and it's the subject of my latest column for Spanish music magazine Playground. Since it appears there in Spanish, I'm publishing it here in English, as usual.

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harris armstrongs stuebner residence in memoriam


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agence eureka

warning: extremely graphic material
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2thewalls

loud paper

junk jet net


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trucknutz the goat

via brian turner
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Though still little-known in the U.S., Solal is one of the greatest European musicians alive today. His life at the piano ranges from lessons with his opera-singer mother in Algiers to post-war collaborations with Django Reinhardt and Sidney Bechet in Paris, to a wide variety of film work.

Solal's music is as complex as his life. Born to Algerian Jewish parents, he moved to France in 1950 when he was 23. He began playing in the underground jazz dives around St.-Germain-des-Pres, and before long, he was recording with the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and ex-pat American saxophonist Don Byas. Fame came to Solal for the music he composed for Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 breakthrough film, Breathless (A Bout de Souffle).

In a new memoir, Solal describes his experiences in the American black jazz world, in the film industry and as a classical composer. His manner betrays an almost childlike sense of curiosity and playfulness. That comes from his lifelong fascination with freedom and structure, says Claude Carriere, a jazz historian and longtime programmer at Radio France.

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Every building Palladio designed, from a simple farmhouse to his grand monastic churches such as San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, was a gem. Designed inside and out according to a sophisticated play of perfect geometry, each one remains an ideal to live up to. Handsomely crafted, imaginatively sited and bringing the best of classical Roman architecture up to date, his buildings had a profound influence on architecture worldwide.

Such was the compelling nature of their design that, after Palladio's death in 1580, British architects began to create buildings - from modest working-class terraces to magisterial country houses, along with town halls, assembly rooms, churches, inns, farmhouses and follies - that owe the essentials of their design, their proportions and much of their architectural spirit to the one-time Paduan stonecutter destined to become one of the greatest architects of all time.

What drew the Palladians, as these young British architects came to be known, to the master's work was its crystal-clear design, free of the pomp and theatrical circumstance of those architectural styles, especially the lavish baroque that came before an 18th-century revival of Palladianism. Here were classical buildings that seemed ideal for 18th-century, protestant Britain. Palladio showed how it was possible to shape a form of architecture that seemed almost timeless. Informed by mathematical logic, it was highly practical, rich in terms of its ideas, and lacked any over-elaborate decoration. No wonder the brightest British Modern movement architects of the 1930s were as in awe of Palladio as they were of Le Corbusier. They saw him, if not altogether correctly, as a kind of proto-Modern.

The work of the Palladians - spearheaded by the Anglo-Irish Earl of Burlington and Colen Campbell, a Scot - became the dominant force in British architecture. They in turn influenced the work of American architects, and by the mid-19th century, examples of Palladian design could be found around the globe, from St Petersburg to Cape Province. Even today, there are architects, notably the father and son team Quinlan and Francis Terry, who continue to work in a tradition descended from Palladio. In fact, the Terrys attract controversy precisely because they insist on pursuing a line of Palladianism, in the design of numerous country houses, as well as major urban shopping and office developments - as if the days of Palladio, or at least his ideals, were still part, parcel and pediment of everyday life.

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american clay (natural pigment wall plaster as used in the previous post)


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private idaho residence


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Longtime Astroland owners Carol and Jerry Albert, who sold most of their land to New York-based developer Thor Equities last year, donated the rocket to the nonprofit Coney Island History Project and have offered to contribute toward the estimated $15,000 cost for moving the landmark from the top of a building—money the nonprofit doesn't have.

People from car-wash owners to museum curators have contacted the Coney Island History Project about the Astroland Moon Rocket, including an amusement park in Pakistan.

"We were kind of wowed by their interest," said the history project's administrative director Tricia Vita in an e-mail. "Our dream placement for the rocket would be in a nonprofit setting where [it] would be preserved and could also be used for educational purposes."

Neither the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, the New York Hall of Science, nor Floyd Bennet Field in Brooklyn was able to provide a new home for the rocket due to lack of space or logistics, she said.

Charles Denson, director of the Coney Island History Project says his group is currently in "serious negotiations" with a group that will move the rocket to a new Coney location. "It looks like it [might] be staying. It's a survivor, and it'll keep the Astroland name alive. It's a time capsule; everything inside is absolutely preserved."

If the rocket is not moved by Jan. 31, it will become the property of Thor Equities, which now owns most of Coney Island.

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flintstones building boulder blocks


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The global dominance of North American tall and low office building typologies throughout the 20th century was nearly total. Skylines worldwide and the physical and social structure of most suburbs are testimonies to this enormous technological, economic, social, cultural, and, of course, architectural achievement. Even the Roman Empire failed to achieve such hegemony.

There are many reasons for this. Two deserve particular attention from architects. The first is the extraordinary daring of architects in Chicago (and a little later in New York) in bringing together multiple technologies to create the high rise office building—in the context, of course, of an extraordinary explosion in economic activity in the U.S. in the last three decades of the 19th century—and the parallel and equally unprecedented inventiveness in real estate, engineering, and construction practice. Second is the specific intellectual debt the world owes to Frederick Taylor’s concept of “Scientific Management,” i.e., the rationalization of the processes of production to achieve greater efficiency not least in the design and construction of office buildings and subsequently in the management of the burgeoning administrative activities within them.

Will the universal success of what I have elsewhere called the “Taylorist” office ever be checked? It would seem so. The enormous increase in the power of Information Technology is well on the way to superseding the purely industrial logic that generated the North American office building. At least one alternative office typology, the essentially anti-Taylorist, “Social Democratic” office, democratically designed with input from Workers’ Councils specifically to respect and defend the rights of each individual office worker, has flourished in the very special (and almost certainly temporary) political and economic environment of post-fascist Northern Europe. Yet another architectural and urbanistic phenomenon, the “Networked Office,” which exploits information technology to create unprecedently free relationships between the physical and the virtual realms is now emerging, and it does not depend on Taylor’s temporal and spatial logic.
HDM fall/winter 2008-09. No. 29

with this issue, harvard design magazine begins a new design and broader cultural focus.

the topic, "what about the inside?," explores the state of interiors and interiority in contemporary art, architecture, fabric design, product design, office buildings, photography, and philosophy.


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Grande Cretto Nero, Alberto Burri


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OCTOBER 115 Industrial Painting's Utopias: Lucio Fontana's “Expectations” Anthony White


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The turning point in Pollock’s career was the mid-1940s. Two significant events occurred in 1945: his marriage to fellow artist Lee Krasner and their move to a house in the countryside in East Hampton. It was in the studio that they set up in the barn that Pollock first began pouring paint, either straight out of the can or with sticks and hardened brushes, directly onto a canvas placed on the floor. In an interview he justified his unusual method of painting by saying that ‘the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture’.1 Pollock felt that his painting technique reflected not only the ‘inner world’ of the unconscious but also the cultural experience of the time he was living in.2 Unexpectedly, to express these things, he felt compelled to move away from figurative art. As he remarked in 1949: ‘I try to stay away from any recognisable image; if it creeps in, I try to do away with it . . . to let the painting come through. I don't let the image carry the painting . . . It's extra cargo and unnecessary.’3 It was important that the meaning of the art work should not be carried by any recognisable image, as this was something extraneous to the medium of painting itself: ‘Experience of our age in terms of painting – not an illustration of but the equivalent: concentrated, fluid.’4 To express the modern age, painting would have to be equal to that age – not to illustrate it through an image but to participate in the intensity and fluidity of modern society through the very manner in which the painting was produced.

Although Pollock rejected many of the traditional methods of artistic control over his painting, preferring to pour, dribble, fling and pool paint onto the canvas, the effect is often staggering and incredibly beautiful. In the ‘classic’ pictures of the period 1947–50, such as One: Number 31, 1950 the black, white, brown, and blue-green arcs of flung paint on unprimed canvas seem to cartwheel before the viewer’s eyes in a majestic dance of colour. Neither a nihilistic statement nor a ‘paint pot flung in the public's face,’ Pollock used the effects of gravity, liquidity of materials, and the collisions between paint and canvas to show the viewer how oil paint behaves when it is pooled, what enamel looks like when it is thrown onto different kinds of surfaces – either dry paint, wet paint or unprimed canvas. Similarly, in his smaller scale enamel on paper works, such as Number 12, 1949 we are directly confronted by the vivid, shiny physicality of the enamel, as well as the extraordinary effects of puckering, marbling, puddling and interlacing of paint in all its raw beauty. In other words, he allowed the materials to speak their own language. As the traces of gravity, liquidity, and fortuitous occurrences appear to have taken place with a minimum intervention of the artist, the painting has what Pollock claimed it should: ‘a life of its own.’5
anthony white
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pop panel


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nowottny sightings: robot baby


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History hints that this downturn could change our tastes. Homes built in the 1940s and '50s, for example, were usually smaller and simpler than large, frilly Victorians that had been in style before the Great Depression and World War II. Materials remained scarce for years after the war, and returning veterans, boosted by mortgage assistance provided under the GI Bill of Rights of 1944, bought Levittowns full of simple new houses as quickly as they could be made.

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brion n bill

PE and RS


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burroughs shotgun paintings


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NO FUN

rip ron ashton


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