Schwarz
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easton 3 story brick end townhouse 4 br / $60k
Q: In the '60s, you were among the first to try to bridge the
gap between high and low cultures. Now, after three decades,
we've seen high culture, or the so-called canon, besieged by
popular culture and multiculturalism. We have today a new
sensibility that, depending on one's perspective, either
surpasses or parodies the kind of sensibility that you heralded
in the last essay of Against Interpretation (1966). We now live
in an age of total eclecticism and global interpenetration,
which many people, including myself, call the postmodern. So
far, your reaction to postmodernism seems largely inimical. And
you refused to allow the Camp sensibility that you helped make
famous to be co-opted by the postmodernists because "Camp
taste... still presupposes the older, high standards of
discrimination" ("Writing Itself" 439).
SS: I never thought I was bridging the gap between high and low
cultures. I am unquestioningly, without any ambiguity or irony,
loyal to the canon of high culture in literature, music, and the
visual and performing arts. But I've also enjoyed a lot of
popular music, for example. It seemed we were trying to
understand why that was perfectly possible and why that wasn't
paradoxical... and what diversity or plurality of standards
might be. However, it didn't mean abolishing hierarchy, it
didn't mean equating everything. In some sense I was as much a
partisan or supporter of traditional cultural hierarchy as any
cultural conservative, but I didn't draw the hierarchy in the
same way.... Take an example: just because I loved Dostoevsky
didn't mean that I couldn't love Bruce Springsteen. Now, if
somebody says you have to choose between Russian literature or
rock 'n roll, of course I'd choose Russian literature. But I
don't have to choose. That being said, I would never argue that
they're equally valuable. But I was very struck by how rich and
diverse one's experiences are. Consequently, it seems to me a
lot of cultural commentators were lying about the diversity of
their experiences. On the other hand, there are a lot of things
in mass culture that didn't appeal to me, notably what's on
television. It seems very non-nourishing, conventional, bland,
trivial. So it wasn't a question of bridging the gap. It's
simply that I saw a lot of simultaneity in my experiences of
pleasure, and felt that most discourse about culture was either
philistine or shallowly snobbish. So it wasn't this is "here,"
and that's "there," and I can make a bridge. It was that I
understood myself to have many kinds of experiences and
pleasures, and I was trying to understand why that was possible,
and how you could still maintain a hierarchical sense of values.
This is not the sensibility that's called the postmodern--by the
way, that's not the word I use or find useful to use. I
associate postmodernism with leveling and with recycling. The
word modernism arose in architecture. It has a very specific
meaning. It meant the Bauhaus School, Corbusier, the box
skyscraper, the rejection of ornament. Form is function. There
are all sorts of modernist dogmas in architecture, which came to
prevail not only because of their aesthetic values. There was a
material support for these ideas: it's cheaper to build
buildings this way. Anyway, when the term postmodernism began to
be used across the field for all the arts it became inflated.
Indeed, many writers who used to be called modern or modernist
are now called postmodern because they recycle, use
quotations--I'm thinking of Donald Barthelme, for instance--or
practice what's called intertextuality.
Q: Yes, the way writers are being relabelled as postmodern is at
times baffling. For example, I was startled when Fredric
Jameson, whose work I greatly admire, cited Beckett--who for me
is a terminal product of high modernism--as a postmodern author.
SS: Jameson is the leading scholar who has tried to make more
sense of the category of postmodernism. One of the reasons I
remain unconvinced by his use of the term is that I don't think
he's interested in the arts. Not really. Not even in literature.
He's interested in ideas. If he cared about literature he
wouldn't have quoted--at great length--Norman Mailer. While you
illustrate your ideas with quotations from novels, you're also
implicitly suggesting to people that they read these books. I
think that either Jameson doesn't know that Mailer isn't a very
good writer, or that he doesn't care. Another example is when
Van Gogh and Warhol are treated as equivalent by Jameson for the
sake of theory-building, for fitting examples into his theory.
That's when I get off the bus. In my view, what's called
postmodernism--that is, the making everything equivalent--is the
perfect ideology for consumerist capitalism. It is an idea of
accumulation, of preparing people for their shopping
expeditions. These are not critical ideas....
Susan Sontag
via hyeprion fb
telex, teletype and early examples of computer art
(mad / haha, wont cut and paste easily)
A group of scientists says that as much as 79 percent of the BP oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico is still present. The scientists released a report this week to counter a rosier picture presented by the federal government that says three-quarters of the oil was recovered, dissolved, burned, skimmed or dispersed. Whichever report is right, so much oil spilled, that millions of barrels of oil still threaten the Gulf ecosystem. And most of the remaining oil cannot be cleaned up.
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A 22-mile-long invisible mist of oil is meandering far below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where it will probably loiter for months or more, scientists reported Thursday in the first conclusive evidence of an underwater plume from the BP spill.
The most worrisome part is the slow pace at which the oil is breaking down in the cold, 40-degree water, making it a long-lasting but unseen threat to vulnerable marine life, experts said.
nice collection of coal chute holes with carved water diversion grooves images. but please can all the mumbo-jumbo design speak. only the slightest mention of their real purpose. signs are of a secondary nature and coal chute grooves were purpose built to keep the basements a little dryer. all coal chutes used to have iron lids (manhole covers). the ones with cement patches had their lids stolen for scrap value first and later by hipsters for cool looking table tops. coal used to be delivered at the street and was stored in a bin below street level near the furnace. this is all relatively recent history, less that 100 years. please, just the facts mam!
via bldblog who seamed to ignore the bs
'71 IH scout 800b
la singularidad de lo obvio - paper mill museum
sweet stairs! (more from jb's links)
Despite an ever-expanding estimate of the volume of the spill, relatively little oil washes ashore at first, and only a small portion ever will. Instead, trapped in the deep, the oil fouls the ocean's twilight and dark zones: the mesopelagic and the bathypelagic (bathos: deep). After April 20, the dumbwaiter rising through the waters of the Gulf of Mexico will be ascending an ocean fouled with a toxic broth of oil, methane, chemical dispersants, and drilling mud. The relatively small amounts of oil washing ashore, and the relief felt when the surface oil began to dissipate, hardly account for the devastation being wrought in the dark world beyond our sight.via hyperion fb
W.A. Mozart - Adagio for Glass Armonica in C-Major, KV 617a
1400 Easton Rd, Kintnersville, PA – $375,000
July 21, 2010 by Joe Leone · Leave a Comment
5100 Sf Mixed Use Commercial Property in Durham Twp on busy Route 611. Three commercial storefronts on first floor. Storefront #1 consists of 1885 sf with Roll Up side door and formally used as antique store. Storefront #2 Consists of 600 sf currently vacant, Storefront #3 consists of 560 sf and is vacant. Second Floor consists of 1800 sf 3 BR apartment. Zoned PC-1. AS of Right Uses include Restaurant, Retail, Service Business, Financial Establishment, Veterinary Clinic, Auto Repair, Car Wash, Offices, Medical Offices, Motel / Hotel, Community Center, Commercial School, Manufacturing, Wholesale Business, Truck Terminal, Auto Sales & Nursery. Conditional Uses include Kennel, Mini Market, Amusement Hall, and Professional Studios. Special Exception Uses include Tavern & Adult Commercial Use. Located on Route 611 (Easton Rd) Property is adjacent to Delaware River Canal. Triangular shaped Site. Parcel is in 100 Year Flood Plain. Close to Routes 212, 412, I-78
1st look at 9/11 museum
Impruneta terracotta
The Boomerang or Skylark Formica pattern by Brooks Stevens in 1950 and updated by Raymond Loewy in 1954
Recycled Island
Calder asked Duchamp, "What should I call these things. " Duchamp replied, "Mobiles, " this was a French pun, which meant motive and motion. Jean Paul Sartre described the mobile as, " The mobile is a little private celebration, an object defined by its movement and having no other existence. A mobile does not suggest anything. It captures genuine living movements. Mobiles have no meaning, they are, that is all. " In Calder's early years as an artist, it seems he was systematic in his approach to "composing motions." Later, having perfected his technical methods, he became ever more inventive with his moving sculpture. The most engaging aspect of Calder's sculpture was its interaction with space. Mobiles participated in lively dialogues with their environs, reacting to air currents and human touch. The stabiles enfolded and incorporated spatial volume. As Calder put it: "I paint with shapes."
During this time, Calder fell under the spell of Leger, Duchamp, Arp, Klee, and Picasso. His greatest influence however was Miro who was a direct inspiration for many of the shapes that he used. Miro’s biomorphic motif survived in Calder's art until the end of his life. Calder’s sculpture was the perfect marriage of abstraction and movement. Einstein once visited a Calder show and stood transfixed for forty minutes in front of a work called Universe. By 1937, Calder was thinking of making monumental public sculptures of his works. He refused to call his work art, "I call them objects, that way no one can come along and say, these aren’t sculptures, it washes my hands of having to define them."
Biomorphism is an art movement that began in the 20th century.
The term was first used in 1936, by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Biomorphist art focuses on the power of natural life and uses organic shapes, with shapeless and vaguely spherical hints of the forms of biology. Biomorphism has connections with Surrealism and Art Nouveau.
jens risom amoeba coffee table 1941
noguchi
There was the time I went to Hawaii in 1939 to do an advertisement (with Georgia O'Keefe and Pierre Roy). As a result of this I had met Robsjohn Gibbings, the furniture designer, who had asked me to do a coffee table for him. ( I had already done a table for Conger Goodyear). I designed a small model in plastic and heard no further before I went west.
While interned in Poston I was surprised to see a variation of this published as a Gibbings advertisement. When, on my return I remonstrated, he said anybody could make a three-legged table. In revenge, I made my own variant of my own table, articulated as the Goodyear Table, but reduced to rudiments. It illustrated an article by George Nelson called 'How to Make a Table'. This is the Coffee Table that was later sold in such quantity by the Herman Miller Furniture Company.
In 1915 Arp was commissioned to decorate the interior walls of a theosophical institute in Paris. He cut large paper shapes in a variety of colors and covered the walls with these "lyrical abstractions," as Richter called them. In 1916 these paper shapes evolved into amoeba-like wood reliefs which Arp painted in various colors, cut rounded holes into, superimposed in several layers, and hung on walls. Although given names suggesting representational images, few of these sculptures were anything but abstract flights of fancy. Speaking of Arp's sculpture, Robert Melville wrote in Arp that many of Arp's works could "be described as the relief maps of a poetic cosmogony: they appear to relate to Arp's avowed interest in the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and in particular to their speculations upon the originative material of things and the coherence of the natural world." Thomas B. Hess, writing in ARTNews, found that Arp's sculpture exhibited a kind of mysticism set off by his "balancing force, wit. It combines with all his philosophies to set up an equilibrium and tension of form and content."
like a broken pediment
"Ms. MacLear said that Johnson was known for weak drawing skills. He had a “high-concept” sketching style, she said. "