cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

This one-of-a-kind siding product comes from olive tanks fabricated by the George Windeler Company of San Francisco in the 1930s. The unique charcoal-grey patina and surface texture comes from decades of exposure to the hot dry summers and chilly wet winters of California’s Central Valley. Once oiled, this material turns a deep ebony with burgundy undertones and reveal.

These unique redwood crescents come from vintage wine tank bottoms. Wine tank redwood is prized for its clarity, grain, patina and 'flavorful' history. A deep, rosy hue from decades steeped in wine gives this already special material additional beauty and prestige. The as-is weathered surface of this wood has been darkened to a charcoal-amber appearance by decades of exposure to sun, wind and rain – the same rarefied climate that produces California wine grapes. The interior face of this wood is marked by crystallized wine residue. Once remilled and oiled, it reveals a rich burgundy luster. This material is well-suited for a variety of applications, including furniture, shelving and finish installations.
via vz
[link] [add a comment]

out of print

via vz
[link] [add a comment]

homes less than 30K

27k easton pa (keep out) brick building


[link] [9 comments]

drive a tank


via vz
[link] [add a comment]

mimo

mosoflo



[link] [add a comment]

what to do when the drummer doesnt show up


[link] [add a comment]

open culture (free movies)


[link] [add a comment]

Diggers and Dreamers: A Directory of Alternative Living in Britian


[link] [1 comment]

colin ward / walter segal and the self-built housing movement


[link] [1 comment]

into production (maria gough the artist as producer)


[link] [add a comment]

Boris Groys The Obligation to Self-Design

At the same time, the project of Russian Constructivism was a total project: it wanted to design life as a whole. Only for that reason—and only at that price—was Russian Constructivism prepared to exchange autonomous art for utilitarian art: just as the traditional artist designed the whole of the artwork, so the Constructivist artist wanted to design the whole of society. In a certain sense, the artists had no choice at the time other than to announce such a total claim. The market, including the art market, was eliminated by the Communists. Artists were no longer faced with private parties and their private interests and aesthetic preferences, but with the state as a whole. Necessarily, it was all or nothing for artists. This situation is clearly reflected in the manifestos of Russian Constructivism. For example, in his programmatic text entitled "Constructivism," Alexei Gan wrote: "Not to reflect, not to represent and not to interpret reality, but to really build and express the systematic tasks of the new class, the proletariat... Especially now, when the proletarian revolution has been victorious, and its destructive, creative movement is progressing along the iron rails into culture, which is organized according to a grand plan of social production, everyone—the master of color and line, the builder of space-volume forms and the organizer of mass productions—must all become constructors in the general work of the arming and moving of the many-millioned human masses."4 For Gan, the goal of Constructivist design was not to impose a new form on everyday life under socialism but rather to remain loyal to radical, revolutionary reduction and to avoid making new ornaments for new things. Hence Nikolai Tarabukin asserted in his then-famous essay "From the Easel to the Machine" that the Constructivist artist could not play a formative role in the process of actual social production. His role was rather that of a propagandist who defends and praises the beauty of industrial production and opens the public's eyes to this beauty.5 The artist, as described by Tarabukin, is someone who looks at the entirety of socialist production as a ready-made—a kind of socialist Duchamp who exhibits socialist industry as a whole as something good and beautiful.

The modern designer, whether bourgeois or proletarian, calls for the other, divine vision: for the metanoia that enables people to see the true form of things. In the Platonic and Christian traditions, undergoing a metanoia means making the transition from a worldly perspective to an otherworldly perspective, from a perspective of the mortal body to a perspective of the immortal soul. Since the death of God, of course, we can no longer believe that there is something like the soul that is distinguished from the body in the sense that it is made independent of the body and can be separated from it. However, that does not by any means suggest that a metanoia is no longer possible. Modern design is the attempt to bring about such a metanoia—an effort to see one's own body and one's own surroundings as purified of everything arbitrary, tasteful, and earthly. In a sense, it could be said that modernism substituted the design of the corpse for the design of the soul.

[link] [add a comment]

Architecture Without Architects—Another Anarchist Approach

The title of this text is a hybrid of two existing titles. “Architecture without Architects” was the name of an influential exhibition by the architect Bernard Rudofsky at the MoMA in 1964; “Housing: An Anarchist Approach” was the name of a famous book by the English architect and anarchist Colin Ward in which the author proclaims the rights and productivity of self-built housing and squatting in postwar Europe. Whereas the latter’s collection of essays discussed specific cases of European and Latin American squatter movements from the 1940s to the 1970s, Rudofsky’s exhibition presented photographs of local vernacular architecture from all over the world, with the claim that architects should learn from premodern architectural forms. Both of these perspectives identify a condition that emerged during decolonization, in which a massive crack appeared in the modernist movement and its vision of top-down planning. But they were also two very different interpretations of the simple fact that, throughout the ages and around the world, architecture has been produced without the intervention of planners or architects. Whereas Rudofsky’s approach suggested an aesthetical and methodological shift, Colin Ward’s was a political reading of spatial self-expressions that might offer new methodologies and an alternative understanding of society. In my article, after more than thirty years of debates about High Modernism, I will try to bring into play a third way of thinking that attempts to connect the question of design with that of the political, from the perspective of a globalized world.

[link] [add a comment]

rip dale hawkins (author susie q)


[link] [add a comment]

gringo


[link] [3 comments]

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I just visited Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who have written an appeal to Barack Obama. What would your appeal and/or advice be to Obama?

Raoul Vaneigem: I refuse to cultivate any relationship whatsoever with people of power. I agree with the Zapatistas from Chiapas who want nothing to do with either the state or its masters, the multinational mafias. I call for civil disobedience so that local communities can form, coordinate, and begin self-producing natural power, a more natural form of farming, and public services that are finally liberated from the scams of government by the Left or the Right. On the other hand, I welcome the appeal by Chamoiseau, Glissant, and their friends for the creation of an existence in which the poetry of a life rediscovered will put an end to the deadly stranglehold of the commodity.

HUO: Could we talk about your beginnings? How did your participation in situationism begin, and what was your fundamental contribution? At the outset of your relationship with the SI, there was the figure of Henri Lefebvre. What did he mean to you at the time? Why did you decide to send him poetic essays?

RV: I would first like to clarify that situationism is an ideology that the situationists were unanimous in rejecting. The term “situationist” was ever only a token of identification. Its particularity kept us from being mistaken for the throngs of ideologues. I have nothing in common with the spectacular recuperation of a project that, in my case, has remained revolutionary throughout. My participation in a group that has now disappeared was an important moment in my personal evolution, an evolution I have personally pressed on with in the spirit of the situationist project at its most revolutionary. My own radicality absolves me from any label. I grew up in an environment in which our fighting spirit was fueled by working class consciousness and a rather festive conception of existence. I found Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life captivating. When La Somme et le reste [The Sum and the Remainder] was published, I sent him an essay of sorts on “poetry and revolution” that was an attempt to unify radical concepts, Lettrist language, music, and film imagery by crediting them all with the common virtue of making the people’s blood boil. Lefebvre kindly responded by putting me in touch with Guy Debord who immediately invited me to Paris. The two of us had very different temperaments, but we would agree over a period of nearly ten years on the need to bring consumer society to an end and to found a new society on the principle of self-management, where life supersedes survival and the existential angst that it generates.
via stefinately
[link] [5 comments]

This was played for me a few months ago as a great example of a drunken and/or strung-out STONES performance recorded as the height of Keith Richards’ drug abuse. Indeed, the photo of him napped out on the front and the wild “magic fingers” guitar riff opening on “Brown Sugar” had me thinking that this would be one of those bootlegs you get for a good laff only, like “Elvis’ Greatest Shits” or whatever that one was that only featured Elvis post-1968 spoken vignettes, mumbling to the crowd under the influence of massive loads of barbituates. But “Will Keith Wake Up In Time For His Afternoon Show In Perth Australia 24/2/1973” is awesome, one of the best Stones live records I’ve ever heard. It doesn’t hurt that it was recorded when the band had just finished their run of recording 3-4 of the greatest rock records of all time (“Sticky Fingers” notwithstanding), so naturally the material played is superlative: “Rocks Off”, “Tumblin’ Dice”, “Happy”, “Gimme Shelter” etc. The 8-minute “Midnight Rambler” is outstanding as well. Jagger might actually be the one who’s loaded this time; everything he says and every word he sings seems driven by that funny substance that makes a 33rpm individual perform at 45rpm. His vocals are hyper and loose, and it’s all the better for this very hyper, loose performance. Keith and Mick Taylor’s guitars are cranked way up to the front of the mix, yet not at the expense of the rest of the Stones. Nicky Hopkins also gets a quick “Happy Birthday” played for him at the end. Better than “Get Your Ya-Yas Out”. I wonder if they’ll be this good when I’m set to see them in November? Probably, hunh?

[link] [add a comment]

Walter Fredrick Morrison, who at 17 sent the lid of a popcorn tin skimming through the air of a California backyard and as an adult remade the lid in plastic, in the process inventing the simple, elegant flying disc known today as the Frisbee, died Tuesday at his home in Monroe, Utah. He was 90.
via vz
[link] [add a comment]

The Corten steel shell that hosts a multi purpose studio was craned into the remains of a nineteenth century brick dovecote at Snape Maltings in Suffolk on the 18th May. Sited at the symbolic threshold of the maltings and the surrounding marshes, the monocoque welded steel box is insulated and lined in plywood to serve as a music space, a visual art studio, a meeting room or residency space.
via justin
[link] [add a comment]

manufacturing consent / hulu


[
link] [add a comment]

fsm (and quality)

Exactly. I never quite believed that there was a thing called "the canon." There were something called "the classics," and the idea was that there were a collection of works of human civilization that, because of their intellectual quality or their historical importance, or both their intellectual quality and importance, were regarded as an essential part of education. So Plato is both important historically and has high intellectual quality. Marx is certainly important historically; you can have debates about the intellectual quality of the work. But both of those are important for people to read. The idea is that we are conveying to you a human civilization with a number of cultural and intellectual achievements of quality and importance. And now that's challenged. Now the idea is, oh well, one book is as good as another. I debated a guy once at another university who said, "Well, you know, Bugs Bunny is as good as Shakespeare. I mean these are all just texts. One text is as much of a text as another text." And indeed one English department at one university said, "We really shouldn't call ourselves the Department of English Language and Literature, we should be called the Department of Textual Studies." And from the point of view of textual studies, well, a cereal box is as good as a sonnet by Shakespeare. It's all just some nonsense. You can always say in French, "C'est la textualité du texte." A certain kind of textuality is all that counts. So that, I think, is ... that isn't just stupid, it's self-destructive. Because if you don't believe that there's a distinction in quality then why on earth would the taxpayers pay you, why would the students pay you to teach this stuff, if one opinion is as good as another and one text is as good as another? That is, I think that the mission that we're engaged in is predicated on a belief in quality.
fsm-a
[link] [add a comment]

The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication by Bertolt Brecht; July 1932

In our society one can invent and perfect discoveries that still have to conquer their market and justify their existence; in other words discoveries that have not been called for. Thus there was a moment when technology was advanced enough to produce the radio and society was not yet advanced enough to accept it. The radio was then in its first phase of being a substitute: a substitute for theatre, opera, concerts, lectures, cafe music, local newspapers and so forth. This was the patient's period of halcyon youth. I am not sure if it is finished yet, but if so then this stripling who needed no certificate of competence to be born will have to start looking retrospectively for an object in life. Just as a man will begin asking at a certain age, when his first innocence has been lost, what he is supposed to be doing in the world. ...As for the radio's object, I don't think it can consist simply in prettifying public life. Nor is radio in my view an adequate means of bringing back cosiness to the home and making family life bearable again. But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction.

[link] [add a comment]

reclassifying aspergers

the stutter gene

(not related)
[link] [add a comment]

There's a line often found in books and magazine articles that claim to tell the history of rock'n'roll that a greasy kid from Memphis named Elvis Presley, goofing around in Sam Phillips' Sun Studio in Memphis in the summer of 1954, belted out a version of Arthur "Big Boy Crudup's That's All Right Mama, and in doing so, brought together the music of white folks and black folks, and invented something called "rock'n'roll". Like most of what is purported to be "the history of rock'n'roll", this is so much hooey. Whites were singing black blues almost within minutes of black "inventing" the blues. If there is something we can call "the truth" (and there is not, but let's pretend), nobody "invented" rock'n'roll, just as no one "invented" the blues or jazz or ragtime, or anything else for that matter. These strains of music, bastardized forms of all the other types of music to found in various regions of America came together in all types of combinations over the years: black men singing ancient Scottish ballads, white men singing cotton patch tunes, classically trained New Orleans Creoles playing the unwritten "rags" of unschooled, uptown blacks, women from the street singing the songs of women from the church, black men with fifes and drums playing the beats from Africa under melodies from Scotland in the hills of Mississippi, waltz's from France sung by African-Americans with accordions whose had come here from Santa Domingo after the slave revolt of 1793, white men in black face, black men in black face, men dressed as women balancing chairs on their face; all of them singing about fucking. These musics all came together, constantly blending and separating, like cells in a petrie dish, and what would would last was the music that someone would pay a buck to hear, the music no one would pay for would fade into obscurity, sometimes to be revived when the dollar was waved from the faraway shores of Europe or Japan. If this sort of thing interets you may I suggest you go and and buy two book by Nick Tosches: Country: The Twisted Roots Of Rock'n'Roll (revised edition, DeCapo Press, 1996) and Where Dead Voices Gather (Little, Brown, 1991), then read them. Then listen to the records he wrote about in those books, much easier to find now than even when they were first released. Then report back here and continue where you left off. By the late 1920's there were dozens of white men singing and recording dirty, lowdown, blues.

[link] [add a comment]

hyperion archive


[link] [add a comment]