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via justin


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jaffe's lloyds house, east hampton, new york 1977

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heating help


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Mr. Drew, a lifelong champion of under-recognized 20th-century composers, took on the cause of Weill, regarded as little more than as an appendage to Bertolt Brecht, shortly after the composer’s death in 1950.

Working with the singer Lotte Lenya and other members of the Brecht-Weill circle, he identified and located previously unknown stage and orchestral works, songs and choruses by Weill. Many of these had to be tracked down in scattered publishing houses around the world; some had to be reconstructed from partial scores. By lecturing, writing, editing, staging performances and organizing recordings, Mr. Drew agitated for Weill all over the world.

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Rashied Ali, whose expressionistic, free-jazz drumming helped define the experimental style of John Coltrane’s final years, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 76.

The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Patricia Ali.

Mr. Ali, who first encountered Coltrane in their Philadelphia neighborhood in the late 1950s, made the leap from admiration to collaboration in the mid-1960s, when he joined Elvin Jones as a second drummer with Coltrane’s ensemble at the Village Gate in November 1965.

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rip east coast skater andy kessler

The current state of skateboarding — the ubiquitous television presence, the department store displays of designer skater apparel, and the proliferation of free municipal skateparks around the country — is roughly to Kessler’s brand of skating what a Country Club swimming pool is to the ocean. His was a raw, aggressive way of skating, fast and slashing and explosive. He fell a lot, bled and got hurt a lot. But there was also a grace to it, a power and soulfulness that often gets lost in the flashy spectacle of televised competitions. There’s a reason Kessler’s skate crew called themselves The Soul Artists of Zoo York. (Incidentally, the Zoo York moniker has resurfaced as a trendy company owned by Ecko Unlimited, but it has precisely squat to do with Kessler or the roots of the East Coast scene.) For most of Kessler’s life, years of which were mired in violence and addiction and the existential angst that torments many a non-conformist, skateboarding wasn’t merely a sport or pastime or even the artistic expression of his soul. It was the path to his soul’s salvation.

Which maybe sounds a little fruity and abstract, but I mean quite the opposite. That is, Kessler’s great and lasting contribution to skateboarding was recognizing its transformative and transcendent qualities, the myriad ways in which a highly individualized endeavor invited, not precluded, community. Such community is why so many of us know his story. Such community is why skaters who never met him feel like they’ve lost a friend with whom they used to seek out drained swimming pools. For all of their perceived destructiveness, for all of their purported unthinking and lawless mischief, skateboarders are a creative and compassionate breed. Often, especially when Kessler was nurturing what would become the East Coast scene, the kids who gravitated toward skateboarding were misfits and malcontents, the shy outcasts who’d been intimidated and sullied by the complex pressures of social interaction. Skateboarding gave them an identity and voice, and Kessler, by example, gave them the confidence to declare themselves to society.

Then, as both he and skateboarding matured, he gave his followers something else: sanctuary. In a landmark initiative, he persuaded the New York City Parks Department to build Manhattan’s first public skatepark in Riverside Park at 108th Street; after the park opened in 1995, Kessler was dubbed the Grandmaster of 108. A unique thrill of skateboarding will always be finding a piece of architecture —the brick banks under the Brooklyn Bridge, say, or a Wall Street handrail or the drained pool in Van Cortlandt Park that became known as “Deathbowl”—and appropriating it, converting it into skateable terrain; however, in staking out land where skaters could convene and ride without harassment, Kessler not only ensured a safe haven, he also mandated that society start seeing skateboarding as more than a nuisance, more than juvenile delinquency. Understand: he wanted more than legitimacy for skateboarders; he wanted respect. Until his death, he supported himself by building and designing skate parks in all of the five boroughs, continuing his life’s work of literally and symbolically transforming the city’s relationship with the skateboarding community.

And he continued skating — dropping into cement bowls, floating his frontside airs and falling and getting wrecked, then limping back to his board. As recently as a few years ago, Kessler slammed so hard that he dislocated his femur and shattered his kneecap. Kessler was 45 at the time and uninsured. To offset his medical expenses, friends held a fundraiser where artists like Julian Schnabel painted skateboards that were auctioned off in a SoHo gallery. A couple of surgeries and $51,000 in medical bills later, Kessler was back on the ramp. This is who he was and how he’ll be remembered, as a man who understood the abiding and cathartic power of resilience. You don’t give in. You take every run — on the ramp, with recovery, at City Hall. It has everything and nothing to do with skateboarding which, at its essence, is the act of focusing so intensely on the body that you feel liberated from your physical form. Think not of swimming in a pool, but of becoming the ocean itself. Think not of flying, but of floating in a place where the ground or gravity has never existed — a place where, at long last, there is no irony, no pain or struggle, where there’s no such thing as falling.
youtube video central park / ny magazine article '05
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In 1972 Lenny Kaye compiled the Nuggets compilation for Elecktra Records, it was subtitled "Artifacts from the first psychedelic era", but the music was soon dubbed punk rock, probably by Greg Shaw, although Dave Marsh seems to think it's important for the world to know that he coined the term. Actually the first use of "punk" in music writing was by Nick Tosches who described Ed Sanders of the Fugs as having a "punk muse". No matter, the sound of these one-hit, teenage American bands was soon changed from punk rock to garage rock to distinguish it from the safety pin through the face variety of 70's punk. What I find so interesting is Lenny Kaye's vision in excavating the past. The music was only six years old (using 1966 as the banner year for American garage), yet Kaye understood it's importance at a time when most rock writers were busy analysing Bob Dylan's lyrics (or digging through his trash), or heralding the coming revolution, which was to be led by the Jefferson Airplane or Abbie Hoffman or whom ever. Only two of the above tracks made it onto Nuggets (Talk Talk was short listed but was unavailable due to legal problems, the Barbarians were represented by the song Moulty, not their best record, but surely a first class "artifact"). The Preachers track appeared on the first Pebbles album (Greg Shaw's bootleg continuation of the Nuggets concept). There was something in the air, for that same year, Mark Shipper released the first Sonics re-issue Explosive (Buckshot), sold through an ad in Who Put The Bomp fanzine. This was followed by the aforementioned Pebbles series which kicked off in 1976 and opened a floodgate. Soon every collector of garage 45's had their own compilation album on the market. My favorites: Hipsville 29 B.C., three volumes (Kramden), What A Way To Die (Satan), Open Up Yer Door (Frog Death) Off The Wall, two volumes, (Wreckord Wracked) The Chosen Few, two volumes (A-Go Go) and of course Back From The Grave nine volumes (Crypt), which was legally done unlike the others which were bootlegs. All of these can be downloaded from various blogs, try looking via Chewbone or Captain's Crawl (new URL). Soon their would be similar comps by every style, region, and/or label configuration possible, sometimes it seems like there were more comps than their were original 45's. The Droogs issued their first 45-- He's Waitin' b/w Light Bulb Blues (Plug'n'Socket), the first "new" group to revive the sound of '66. By the mid-70's more bands appeared like the Fleshtones, DMZ and the Chesterfield Kings to play much in the style of these (not very) old records. This caused much confusion as to what "punk" was or should be. I bring this up because the world seemed so much bigger and more mysterious back then, when everything hadn't been re-issued. The fans themselves were able to grasp control of the music for the first time ever. It really did change history.

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meljac toggle light switch

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actually i found this product thumbing through an '88 copy of conrans house book although no mfgr name was offered.
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Anthropologists were the first to recognize that taxonomy might be more than the science officially founded by Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, in the 1700s. Studying how nonscientists order and name life, creating what are called folk taxonomies, anthropologists began to realize that when people across the globe were creating ordered groups and giving names to what lived around them, they followed highly stereotyped patterns, appearing unconsciously to follow a set of unwritten rules. Not that conformity to rules was at first obvious to anthropologists who were instead understandably dazzled by the variety in folk taxonomies. The Ilongots, for example, a people of the Philippines, name gorgeous wild orchids after human body parts. There bloom the thighs, there fingernails, yonder elbows and thumbs. The Rofaifo people of New Guinea, excellent natural historians, classify the cassowary, a giant bird complete with requisite feathers and beak, as a mammal. In fact, there seemed, at first glance, to be little room even for agreement among people, let alone a set of universally followed rules. More recently, however, deep underlying similarities have begun to become apparent.

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More than 40 years ago, a group of young Manhattan architects with a shared interest in the aesthetics of old-fashioned Modernism began getting together to talk about their work, their lives and the state of the field. And in the decades that followed, even as their styles grew apart — and as they became celebrities in and beyond the world of architecture — they continued talking.

But now the group, long known as the New York Five, is shrinking: After losing its first member, John Hejduk, in 2000, a second, Charles Gwathmey, died last week.

Following the news of Mr. Gwathmey’s death, at 71, friends and colleagues from within and outside the group spoke about his weekend houses on the East End of Long Island — especially one he designed for his parents, completed in 1966 — and his additions to public buildings, like the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art & Architecture Building at Yale, by Paul Rudolph.

But they also remembered his beginnings as one of the New York Five, or the Whites, as the group was also known because of its proclivity for white buildings inspired by the purist forms of Le Corbusier. Along with Mr. Gwathmey and Mr. Hejduk, the group included Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier.

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"unnecessary quotation marks"

thx "mark"
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worn free

via adman
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There’s a lesson here about how we think of consuming culture. Maybe we can once and for all stop defaulting to easy categorical boundaries between high and low, and discriminate instead between the well made and the shoddy. After all, didn’t Obama’s election prove that people will respond to vision and intelligence, that familiar binary (racial and ideological) pigeonholes no longer necessarily apply, and that the very good can occasionally become very, very popular?

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If not for Mad magazine, there might never have been (in no particular order) 1960s youth culture, underground comics, Wacky Packs, “Laugh-In,” “Saturday Night Live,” R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman or an age of irony, period. Mad, which began in 1952 as a comic book that parodied “serious” comics as well as American popular culture, with an emphasis on television, movies and advertising, was conceived and originally edited by Harvey Kurtzman (1924-93), a Brooklyn-born comic-strip artist, writer and editor. Kurtzman was the spiritual father of postwar American satire and the godfather of late-20th-century alternative humor. If this seems like hyperbole, all you have to do is read The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics.

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Removal of Objects at Snug Harbor Stirs Uproar


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know your fm stations

via am fm tv reception guide and directory
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"the yellow pages are here. the yellow pages are here!"

dallas yellow pages artist karl hoefle. later norman baxter took over


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"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hiphop. As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history. Rather than concentrating on those traditionally favored styles, the book traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies--including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes and television --to give a fuller, more balanced account of the broad variety of music that captivated listeners over the course of the twentieth century. Wald revisits original sources--recordings, period articles, memoirs, and interviews--to highlight how music was actually heard and experienced over the years. And in a refreshing departure from more typical histories, he focuses on the world of working musicians and ordinary listeners rather than stars and specialists. He looks for example at the evolution of jazz as dance music, and rock 'n' roll through the eyes of the screaming, twisting teenage girls who made up the bulk of its early audience. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles are all here, but Wald also discusses less familiar names like Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Mitch Miller, Jo Stafford, Frankie Avalon, and the Shirelles, who in some cases were far more popular than those bright stars we all know today, and who more accurately represent the mainstream of their times. Written with verve and style, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll shakes up our staid notions of music history and helps us hear American popular music with new ears.

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I’ve not been to what was the Colonia Marina XXVIII Ottobre at Cattolica since it was an abandoned cluster of some of the most intriguing, and bizarre, of all the many “colonie”, or summer camps, buildings commissioned by Mussolini’s government. Here were expressionist concrete buildings in the guise of stylised ships and locomotives for Italian youth to spend fascist summers by the sea. The design, dating from 1932, was by Clemente Busiri-Vici [1887-1965], and today’s shark pool, I discover from Suarez and Roia, architects of “Le Navi” was indeed once the canteen.

This reminded me of a trip I made some years ago to Calambrone to see the empty shell of the Colonia Maria Rosa Maltoni Mussolini designed, from 1925, by Angiolo Mazzoni [1894-1979], an architect who had married the daughter of Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s Minister of Communications. The buildings were special, and haunting. But, should they be condemned physically as well as morally because of their fascist past?

In truth, the reason surviving Italian fascist “colonie” are largely abandoned has less to do with their political provenance and more to do with the fact that they are often set in remote locations, and finding new uses for them has not been easy.

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My aunt and uncle lived in this Frank Lloyd Wright house. The ceilings went from 6' to 20'. My uncle was 6'7". The house had no shower so they had to put a shower in the entry to the carport. Frank Lloyd Wright said "...anyone over six feet tall is a weed." My uncle called Frank Lloyd Wright "...an unwashed midget." That said, it was a beautiful house with lots of built-in furniture, delightful views, and a leaky roof. The city of Madison, Wisconsin finally built the Frank Lloyd Wright inspired Monona Terrace in 1997, but it is by no means a pure FLW design.

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ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE for WSJ

New York

The Guggenheim Museum has chosen to honor the 50th anniversary of its (you should pardon the word) iconic building by Frank Lloyd Wright with a monumental exhibition that pays tribute to the architect’s life work and fills the spiral ramp from top to bottom, or bottom to top, depending on how you choose to see it. Curiously, the only meaningful gesture the installation makes to its dramatic setting is the view of the gorgeous curtain Wright designed for the Hillside Theater at Taliesin in 1952, glowing colorfully across the spiral, and the presentation of the Guggenheim Museum itself as the climax of the show. The display neither challenges nor exploits the building’s unique spatial possibilities. It would fit just as well into any set of conventional galleries.

This is not from any lack of thoughtful consideration of the material and its presentation. But what “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,” a collaborative effort of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, really pays tribute to is the completeness, depth and beauty of the Frank Lloyd Wright archives—assiduously collected, protected and now meticulously maintained at Taliesin West, Wright’s home and studio in the Arizona desert—and, not least, to the long-term, dedicated stewardship of Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, director of the archives.

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Paradise does not exactly come to mind when strolling past the neat rows of unornamented concrete apartments that make up La Cité des États-Unis, or City of the United States — one of France’s first modernist social housing complexes, in Lyon’s unpretentious Eighth Arrondissement.

A few graffiti tags mark the six-story walls. Couscous and kebab restaurants are sleepy in the midafternoon lull. Groups of young men hang out on the sidewalk and flirt with women, as elderly French couples and young immigrant families go about their business.

But the 1,410-unit housing complex was considered a utopian model when it was built, largely in the 1920s and early ’30s, offering such enlightened amenities as private bathrooms, running water and garbage collection. Now, three-quarters of a century later, it is the first stop on a new tour — called Utopies Réalisées, or Achieved Utopias — of efforts by modern architecture to devise ideal places to live.

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The winning submission in a competition to re-develop the Point Square as a new civic and public space for Dublin city was announced today.

LiD Architecture’s concept for the public space was chosen by the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland (RIAI) on behalf of the competition promoters, Point Village Limited. The central idea of LiD Architecture’s winning submission is to use shipping containers as cheap and basic building blocks that can be configured creatively to suit whatever event is being housed in the docklands space, which is known as ‘The Parlour’.

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archie campbell / hee haw

One of Campbell's 'signature' routines was to tell stories in "Spoonerism" form, with the first letters of words in some phrases intentionally switched for comic effect. The best-known of these stories was "RinderCella," his re-telling of the fairy tale "Cinderella," about the girl who "slopped her dripper" (dropped her slipper). Campbell once told the "RinderCella" story on an episode of the game show Juvenile Jury. At the conclusion of the story, host Jack Barry said "That's one of the funniest stories Carchie Ampbell tells." All of Campbell's spoonerism routines borrowed heavily from comedy routines performed by Colonel Stoopnagle on the radio show Stoopnagle and Budd in the 1930s.

Campbell also performed a routine with various partners generally known as "That's Bad/That's Good." Campbell would state a troublesome occurrence; when the partner would sympathize by saying, "Oh that's bad," Campbell would quickly counter, "No, that's good!", and then state a good result from the previous occurrence. When the partner would say, "Oh that's good!", Campbell would immediately counter with "No, that's bad!" and tell the new result . . . and so on.
pee little tiggs.


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