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Hundreds of buildings commissioned by the Works Progress Administration and Roosevelt’s other “alphabet” agencies are being demolished or threatened with destruction, mourned or fought over by small groups of citizens in a new national movement to save the architecture of the New Deal. In July, at the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico, a dozen buildings built in the Spanish Revival style in the 1930s, including murals with Native American themes, were bulldozed. In Chicago, architectural historians have joined with residents of Lathrop Homes — riverfront rows of historic brick public housing — to try to persuade the Chicago Housing Authority not to raze the complex. In Cotton County, Okla., a ruined gymnasium has only holes where windows used to be. Across the country, schools, auditoriums and community centers of the era are headed for the wrecking ball.

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1556jpgFRENCH Side table with trapezoidal top covered in black laminate, on compass-shaped legs. 22" x 17 3/4" x 17 3/4" $800 - $1,200
we went and checked out the showroom display of furniture at ragos next modern auction. this is a no reserve auction but they wont take below 1/2 the minimum estimate price. which sounds reasonable. highlights were :

some of phillip lloyd powels liquidated estate items. what appears to be a funky eclectic collection of built-ins he incorporated into his place.

free edge tables with wrought iron legs

a handsom woodgrain formica samson berman extention table with three leaves

POUL KJAERHOLM / RUD. RASMUSSENS Douglas fir and enameled steel desk with single drawer.

a george nelson fireplace set

described as birdcage chairs

FREDERICK WEINBERG Black enameled metal bar

design research bench

a whole mess of harry bertoia chrome side chairs


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5 x 45s fridays #2


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lets get mick ronson into the rr hall of fame. vote now.

via vz
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One night in Mexico, in Manzanillo, I took some acid and I threw the I Ching,” Ken Kesey says in Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Kesey continued: “The great thing about the I Ching is, it never sends you Valentines, it slaps you in the face when you need it.”

Kesey always was attuned to bad rumblings in the cosmos. So are Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan, the editors of “Toward 2012.” Their anthology of New Age essays is organized around the notion that, not to put too fine a point on it, the world as we know it might end on Dec. 21, 2012. Talk about a slap in the face.
thx robin
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Is This the Art World’s Own Ponzi Scheme?

The wheels of justice have been slowly grinding away in the Salander bankruptcy case. Last week, Josh Baer reported that art world figures were appearing before a grand jury. Today, Bloomberg follows up with essentially the same story but some details on the bankruptcy.

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bowling alone


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weeks A frame


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radiator heat


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dont lets start


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The smell was tracked to a NJ company called Frutarom, which processes fenugreek seeds for food additives. It does not appear that the company is violating any rules or laws.

Mayor Bloomberg: "It's just one of the many aromas we're going to have to live with. I can think of a few things worse than maple syrup." He considers the case CLOSED and thinks the hero is 311, due to all the calls to the system querying the smell. On to the map!

Questions: The Mayor isn't sure if Frutarom is the only company producing this smell. He likes maple syrup on his French toast. He says the cost of the investigation is negligible—it's part of what the city does.

When asked how the city knew the smell isn't dangerous, the Mayor pointed out that there were no reports at hospitals. Bloomberg said the city has 60,000 data points daily and a health-issue was noted, the city would have put it together. Another reporter asked if this would further degrade New Jersey's image; Mayor Bloomberg, ever the diplomat, pointed out there are lovely parts of the Garden State, adding that there are parts of Willets Point are really polluted, too (self-slam?).

We just asked the Mayor if there was any thought of a maple syrup smell warning system—alerts when Frutarom processed the fenugreek seeds. He said no, so the next time we smell it we'll have to assume it's either from Frutarom or we're going crazy.
why didnt frutarom come forward when everyone was asking about the maple smell all these years now? bloomberg probably heard its no danger from disaster apologist christy todd whitman. suppose we dont want to smell roasted fenugreek seeds when ever they want us to. bah!

thanks jim


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In 1957, after abandoning a law degree and directing his efforts to painting, Manzoni, at age 24, joined the Nucleari, a group whose art addressed the atomic bomb, and produced some of his first important work, haunting images painted in black tar. Swirling and heaping gobs of the stuff onto canvas, Manzoni conjured organic shapes that rise against glimpses of red and burnt brown. The three versions at Gagosian are visions of apocalyptic gloom, infused with a young man's angst.

But Manzoni, ever restless, quickly dispensed with raw emotion as he found himself drawn to purification and reduction, common urges in that postwar decade. Taking his cue from earlier works like Rauschenberg's white paintings or Guy Debord's film without images, Manzoni eliminated "all useless gestures" and began making his Achromes, virtually colorless three-dimensional surfaces created, in the best of them, by coating wrinkled canvases in white clay.
view work
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Millard Fuller, who at 29 walked away from his life as a successful businessman to devote himself to the poor, eventually starting Habitat for Humanity International, which spread what he called “the theology of the hammer” by building more than 300,000 homes worldwide, died Tuesday near Americus, Ga. He was 74.

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e5cd

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AP Accuses Obama Artist Shepard Fairey Of Copyright Infringement

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rip lux interior

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There are more than 100, 000 chemicals used in commercial products in this country, and only about 1% have been studied for any possible health consequences. We’ll talk about the dangers these chemicals (and potential alternatives) with Monona Rossol. She is President and founder of Arts Crafts and Theater Safety.

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If some of the readers of my last post have their way, suburbia could eventually evolve into something straight out of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel “The Road,” where a desolate, polluted land is dotted with abandoned homes and buildings that have been stripped of all valuable parts, and lawlessness (and cannibalism) rules the streets.

Others, who advocated letting the land take over, might enjoy reading Alan Weisman’s vivid description of how that process would work in “The World Without Us”: “[P]ipes burst but if you lived where it freezes and rain is blowing in where windows have cracked from bird collisions and the stress of sagging walls … eventually the walls lean to one side, and finally the roof falls in.” (There’s a terrific video on www.worldwithoutus.com that shows “Your House Without You”: mold and bugs jump in immediately, wildlife moves in by year 50, plant life takes over by about year 100.)

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C3


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So often, those with limited means feel they are being sequestered and forced into something substandard,” Mr. Stone said. “Why would they want to live in shipping containers if no one else does?” And then it occurred to the architects: “We should figure out how to create housing so cool that everybody would want to live in it.” What followed was more than a year of intellectual ferment, during which the group roped in various Newark officials as well as the architecture school at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The result was “Live the Box: An International Design Competition.”

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dickie goodman didnt pay royalties


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284

POUL VOLTHER / ERIC JORGENSEN Corona lounge chair with red wool cushions on steel base.


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pyramid club ave a stories 81-85


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The High Water Recording Company was founded by David Evans in 1979, as part of Memphis State University’s College of Communication and Fine Arts. Original funding came from the NEA. Such factoids make High Water sound like one more exercise in academic blues-ology, producing more fodder for the folkways archives, destined to be alphabetized by German collectors. However, thanks to Evans’ grasp of his local scene, and his embrace of the good old commercial impulse and its ultimate format, the 45, the records he produced transcend more traditional field recordings made by Alan Lomax, Chris Strachwiz, and Evans himself on earlier outings.

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But Evans wanted to model High Water after what Sam Phillips originally did at Sun Records by making the first records by a younger generation previously unknown beyond their own home turf. Evans even began numbering the High Water catalog by picking up where Sun had left off with their last single. The first of these was “Going Down” b/w “Cotton Fields” and “Boss Man” (HW 408), by one of Ike Turner’s original sidemen, sax honker Raymond Hill and his wife Lillie. Also in that original set of four was Jessie Mae Hemphill’s “Jessie’s Boogie” b/w “Standing in My Doorway Crying” (HW 409), R.L. Burnside’s “Bad Luck City” b/w “Jumper Hanging Out on the Line” (HW 410), and Rainie Burnette’s “Coal Black Mattie” b/w “Hungry Spell” (HW 411).


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