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You can use the feeds in this mix as the basis for a new mix - create a new mix from this mix.
Oxygen on Vimeo [New Window]
http://vimeo.com/4433312 Vanilla Sky [New Window]
http://www.fukhaos.com/labs/ceu.html Las Vegas Growth - 1984 to 2009 [New Window]
http://j.photos.cx/vegasgrowthsatellitephotos-754.gif Amazon's Kindle DX - 9.7" Wireless Reading Device [New Window]
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0015TCML0/ Gloomy Bear Arm Pillow [New Window]
http://fimg.hanmail.net/tenth/img/o/j/s/k/1Akx2/52/867cba-23539.jpg The treasure at end of the rainbow [New Window]
http://hostmypics.co.za/out.php/i97_1zew11g.jpg Twishitter, twittering while on the can [New Window]
http://twishitter.com Chuck Norris Was Here [New Window]
http://www.google.com/search?q=chuck+norris+was+here The Youtube Mix [New Window]
http://inbflat.net Did You Know? [New Window]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDLIwlzkgY&fmt=18 Index of / [New Window]
http://www.demotivatorblog.com Long-Exposure Shot of a Roomba's Path [New Window]
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3568/3458136141_bb0bbe5812_b.jpg The White House: The First 100 Days [New Window]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHVtuc3UCBM&fmt=18 Windows 7 Wallpapers vs Ubuntu Wallpapers [New Window]
http://www.papygeek.com/design/wallpapers-windows-7-rc-versus-wallpapers-ubuntu/ Dropzone: the swiss army knife of drag & drop for the Mac [New Window]
http://aptonic.com Nokia N97 Pre-order [New Window]
http://europe.nokia.com/n97/preorder The new Digg Is Here! [New Window]
http://digg.com/d1pdx1 Influenza [New Window]
http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/h1n1_05_06/h30_18818099.jpg YooouuuTuuube [New Window]
http://www.yooouuutuuube.com Warning screen appears on the iPhone when the operating temperature has become too hot [New Window]
http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/HT1871/HT1871_1.jpg Does he look like a bitch? [New Window]
http://imgur.com/Juc.jpg YouTube's Got Talent! [New Window]
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cover&search_sort=video_avg_rating We Icons : Mac, Windows and PNG icons [New Window]
http://weloveicons.com/page/1/?show=100 Google Morocco Hacked [New Window]
http://google.co.ma mots.jp [New Window]
http://www.snapshack.net/images/tokyo.jpg EnglishForums.com [New Window]
Learn English, Study English, Teach English 19451998 - Half a Century of Nuclear Explosions [New Window]
a haunting visualization of the 2053 atomic explosions that occurred on this planet, from the Trinity test at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945, to the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of 1998. In Heaven There Is No Beer [New Window]
Devil Dick has just shared the alarming news via the Transcendental Sisters of St. Francis who sing the cautionary tale "In Heaven There Is No Beer". Let me get this straight...they're trying to encourage us to misbehave to avoid this horrible fate? Fortunately I already have friends who are saving me a bar stool in Hell, but some of you might be in trouble if you're thinking about having a Cold One in the Hereafter. Bulletin Previmeteo.TV sur la France pour le 05 juillet 2009 et le lundi 06 juillet 2009 [New Window]
Bulletin de prvisions mtorologique pour la France, avec l'animation satellite sur la France et les prvisions pour le 05 juillet 2009 et le lundi 06 juillet 2009Author: previmeteoTags: news France mto previmeteo temps Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 09:00:27 -0500 buzzmygeek:rencontre jean pierre jeunet 2/3 [New Window]
visit http://blog.landofthegeeks.comAuthor: buzzmygeekTags: buzzmygeek warner chandleyr jean pierre jeunet mic mac tire larigot Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 09:00:14 -0500 I Love a Marching Band, But In Your Case I'll Make an Exception [New Window]
Can't get enough of high school marching band music, even after sitting through Independence Day parades and patriotic TV programs? I've got one that'll make you finally cry "Uncle", with its versions of the Hogan's Heroes Theme, Also Sprach Zarathrustra, Hey Jude, a medley from "Hair", and a mambo original, in all its seventies glory. Coding like it's 1999 ~ Authentic Boredom [New Window]
The P2P Web (part one) : Daytime Running Lights [New Window]
Greatest freak out ever @ ss Blog [New Window]
Greatest freak out ever GuiM.fr - Le Blog: Vino in iPhone Veritas ! [New Window]
Reportage soire d'ouverture l'estrade (argein 09) [New Window]
Reportage soire d'ouverture l'estrade (argein 09)14 avril 2007Author: DispluggedTags: Reportage soire douverture lestrade argein Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:53:36 -0500 Far Cry 2 Review [New Window]
my review of far cry 2Author: hurricanekid13Tags: hurricanekid13 review Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:52:25 -0500 Who is Debbie Rowe? [New Window]
CNN's Mary Snow takes a look at the woman who could complicate custody issues for Michael Jackson's family.Author: CNN_InternationalTags: CNN lifestyle people Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:48:37 -0500 Los Gusanos - La gangrena [New Window]
Album: ...Author: AuyantepuiTags: los gusanos gangrena Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:48:34 -0500 Korean Swing [New Window]
Duo sur une chanson corenneAuthor: maxam_80Tags: core centre culturel karaoke Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:48:10 -0500 Dzie 6 (4.07.2009) - XXII Saletyskie Spotkanie Modych [New Window]
Author: spotsalTags: saletyni spotkanie dbowiec modzie Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:46:29 -0500 Fourth of July in Iraq [New Window]
CNN's Michael Ware takes a look at how one Army division is celebrating the Fourth of July in Iraq.Author: CNN_InternationalTags: CNN news Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:46:17 -0500 Canada Day 09 Hungarian 04 [New Window]
Author: trawntaTags: ethnic dancing costumes Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:43:55 -0500 Reportage festival terre de couleurs 2007 [New Window]
Reportage festival terre de couleurs 2007Author: DispluggedTags: Reportage festival terre couleurs 2007 Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:43:24 -0500 Learn How To Make Your Own Solar Panels [New Window]
Learn how to make your own solar panels easily and cheaply & save $1000's on electricity bills. Visit http://www.my-linker.com/hop/MakeSolarPower for step-by-step instructions and videos that will assist you in learning how to make your own solar panels ----------------------------------------------- how to make your own solar panels panel your own at home made a pv cheap scratch for free from video learn kids home use energy power powered electric electricity homemade efficient highly affordable I we instructions video tips guide PDF DIY house residence residential create mini small build installAuthor: scottwiifreak737Tags: how make your own solar panels panel home made cheap scratch for free from video learn kids use energy power powered electric electricity homemade efficient highly affordable Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 5.0Votes: 1
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:42:28 -0500 chicopouri lascard [New Window]
Author: steevens41Tags: chauve dboule Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:42:20 -0500 Parodie du Titanic [New Window]
Author: Jordan_6797Tags: parodie titanic Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 5.0Votes: 1
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:42:06 -0500 les vaches [New Window]
Author: simdu50Tags: vaches rentr pour traite Posted: 04 July 2009Rating: 0.0Votes: 0
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:41:58 -0500 The EveryBlock source code [New Window]
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about the future of XHTML [New Window]
While we recognize the value of the XHTML 2 Working Group's contributions over the years, after discussion with the participants, W3C management has decided to allow the Working Group's charter to expire at the end of 2009 and not to renew it. Le futur de HTML [New Window]
Dans toute cette aventure, ce que j'ai appris le plus, ne ft pas vraiment la technologie, mais bien la vie et les relations tribales de pouvoir des communauts. FLASH CS4 : Publier sa webcam en AS3 (FMS ou RED5)... [New Window]
Suite une forte demande sur les forums Mediabox, voici comment publier simplement sa webcam en AS3 en utilisant un serveur FMS ou RED5 (oflaDemo)... Flex/FMS Videochat : open access pendant un mois pour tester... [New Window]
Pas mal de personnes me demandent des accs mon video chat dvelopp sur Flex... et ce juste pour tester une seule fois... FLASH CS4 : MiniChat AS3... [New Window]
Non, ce n'est pas un MSN like, juste un portage en AS3 d'un chat ultra simple... FLASH CS4 : loaderInfo / flashVars [New Window]
ou comment passer et rcuprer des variables de Javascript Flash... FLASH CS4 TIPS : transform.matrix3D=null... [New Window]
ou comment annuler la "bitmaptisation" d'un clip vectoriel aprs lui avoir inflig une rotation 3D... Flash Builder 4 & Flash Catalyst Public Betas... [New Window]
Depuis hier, Flash Builder 4 & Flash Catalyst versions demo sont tlchargeables sur Adobe Labs. FLASH CS4 : ExternalInterface > Javascript inside Flash... [New Window]
ou comment "embeder" le code Javascript directement dans Flash sans avoir le coller dans la page HTML... FLASH CS4 : Bibliothque partage (Shared Library) en AS3... [New Window]
...ou comment crer une bibliothque partage dans laquelle l'on peut stocker ces clips, bitmap, polices ou sons...Idal pour le travail de groupe! FLASH CS4 : Enregistrer le flux de sa webcam en AS3 (FMS ou RED5)... [New Window]
Suite une forte demande sur les forums Mediabox, voici comment enregistrer le flux de sa webcam en AS3 en utilisant un serveur FMS ou RED5 (oflaDemo)... Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Update (10.0.2)... [New Window]
Cette mise jour (10.0.2) rglera pas mal de problmes et de bugs rencontrs depuis la mise en vente de Flash CS4... Classe php pour utiliser l'API de Flickr [New Window]
HOW TO Quickie: Embedded Flickr Slideshows PaulStamatiou.com [New Window]
Inclure une gallerie flickr dans une page web Papier et encre lectronique - Educanet [New Window]
Groupe Kayak - Cema Ile de France - Accueil [New Window]
Descriptif des logiciels installs sur le portable Ordi35 [New Window]
Arles : 40 ans d'histoires photographiques - Culture - Le Monde.fr [New Window]
Sewer Zeppelins for the Era of Infrastructural Anarchy & Other Roman Tales [New Window]
(Stuck Inflatable Zeppelin, part of a series of installations collectively called Sciame di Dirigibili by Hctor Zamora at the 2009 Venice Art Biennale. Photo by Stunned.org. Source.)Last month, a cadre of guerilla architecture critics (or just plain vandals) splashed the white walls of Richard Meier's Ara Pacis Museum with green and red paint, thus rendering the Italian tricolor in an unintentional homage to America's greatest living painter, though permanent Roman habitu, Cy Twombly.It was presumably the first outwardly visceral manifestation of popular distaste for the building.(The Natural History of Cy Twombly. Photo by Riccardo De Luca/AP Photo. Source.)Many others no doubt would like nothing more than to deface the museum. The mayor, for instance, has been very vocal about wanting to remove it (minus the altar, of course) and then reconstruct it fuori le Mura. Whether this would mean that the original will be recycled for the new building or entirely torn down into unsalvageable detritus, these urbicidal fantasies of demolition, alteration and displacement are pretty much on par with the spatial history of the piazza.The new building, for instance, replaced a pavilion partly designed by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo under Benito Mussolini to house the Ara Pacis, which was discovered somewhere offsite and relocated to its present location. This earlier building was dismantled, because it was deemed incapable of protecting the ancient monument from Rome's damaging pollution and summer weather. However, a stone wall containing inscriptions of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti was kept and incorporated into Meier's building design.Meanwhile, the demolished pavilion itself was part of a Fascist program of erasure. Mussolini wanted to create a new piazza, the center piece of which would be the Mausoleum of Augustus. At the time, parts of the tomb laid buried beneath several layers of urban fill and topped with a concert hall, the latest in a long line of adaptive reuse programs. The tomb was further hidden by narrow streets and dense urban growth. To liberate it, Mussolini simply obliterated the surrounding neighborhood.Left untouched were a couple of churches, one of which, San Rocco, is a fascinating impasto of Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical and Palladian styles. These survivors — together with Morpurgo's pavilion and a complex of new modern buildings for use by Fascist Party functionaries — were calibrated to frame the bounded space of the new Piazza Augusto Imperatore.It's interesting to note here that embedded on the facades of the new buildings are friezes, mosaics and inscriptions, a decorative program no doubt intended to create a link with the sculptural reliefs on the Ara Pacis on the other side of the piazza. One of those inscriptions, apart from mythologizing Mussolini and Fascism, actually commemorates the restoration of the Mausoleum of Augustus and by extension celebrates the urban pogrom that had to be metted out in order to liberate the tomb from its shadowy grave. So perhaps if the mayor were to carry out his own pogrom, then he, too, may commemorate it with yet another set of friezes on the front of the new museum. These will also memorialize our liberation from starchitectural stupor.In any case, to add to these violent, cross-spatiotemporal architectural critiques, Meier stated after the demolition of Morpurgo's pavilion but before the start of construction of his new museum that he wanted (and may yet still want) to tear down the other Fascist-era additions to the piazza. These buildings may have perfectly acted out Mussolini's urban scenography of Fascist ideologies but the resulting piazza is an incredibly failed urban space. It's inhospitable to everyday use and pedestrians avoid it. Meier presumably knows better. And if he gets his way, then there would be another occasion for textual frotteurism and iconographical link-orgy: a sculptural band of friezes in which we see the wannabe urban planner in the guise of the Angel of Modernism — Meier Dux, the liberator of the Eternal City from its own ancientness.But we're obviously digressing.(Stuck Inflatable Zeppelin, part of a series of installations collectively called Sciame di Dirigibili by Hctor Zamora at the 2009 Venice Art Biennale. Photo by Stunned.org. Source.)When reading about the incident, what grabbed our complete attention wasn't the paint job. What actually spurred us into confecting this post was the porcelain toilet and the two packs of toilet paper left at the scene. Because these scatological implements aren't the most imaginative form of activism (or for no other reason than just because), we set about concocting less facile, though dubiously practical, strategies of protest. We used the following as points of departure.1) As far as we know, no one has yet come forward to claim responsibility for the vandalism. The presence of Graziano Cecchini in the crowd of onlookers at the scene, however, elicited some very faint accusatory speculations. Cecchini, you might remember, was the artist and member of the neo-Futurist group, ATM Azionefuturista 2007, who dyed the Trevi Fountain red nearly two years ago, an incident which we covered here then. If you can also recall, he turned the fountain's crystal clear waters into a vermillion Nile as a way to protest the obscenely high cost of organizing that year's International Film Festival of Rome — like a self-righteous Moses preaching to a bunch of uber-consumerist Ramesseses.2) Earlier that summer, another incident occurred at the Trevi Fountain and at other Roman fountains. You can say that it was similarly faintly Biblical: the waters parted — or rather dried up — which is probably the same thing. The culprits that time weren't hydro-anarchists venting out grievances with the hegemonic elite or vandal-artists enacting one of their staged happenings using the built environment as their canvas and minor urban disasters as their paint. As we reported at the end of last year, the water supply to the fountains were cut short when construction workers across town damaged an ancient pipe while building a private underground car park. The blockage was discovered when a waterborne camera was slithered through the city's rhyzomatic ecosystem of voids to pinpoint its location.While the tired, sweaty tourists around the city didn't erupt into a riotous mob, this incident left us wondering whether they could be agitated into a pillaging horde if you strategically pinch the right combination of ganglial pathways of the city's infrastructural network.3) Staying in Rome but venturing more than a century back in time: in the 1870s, we read in The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, archaeologists dug up the floor of the Colosseum and exposed its basement corridors. This apparently upset so many people, including the Pope, because it meant removing the arena's religious paraphernalia, such as the Stations of the Cross, a huge crucifix in the center and a hermitage and its hermit. The recently unified Italian state, in other words, was seen to be trampling over sacred ground, and the birthplace of so many martyrs and saints, was to be converted into a secular artifact, an archaeologist's play pen.But of greater interest for us here is the fact that during the excavation, drainage was such a problem that the sewers and underground corridors had filled with water. Harkening back to when it used to host mock naval battles, the Colosseum remained an artificial lake for many years until a new sewer was built to channel the water away. 4) Returning to the present but now venturing out of the city: decorating this post are CC-licensed photos of Stuck Inflatable Zeppelin, one of several installations collectively called Sciame di Dirigibili by the Mexican artist Hctor Zamora at this year's Venice Art Biennale.5) Further afield: in an article published by The New York Times in 2003, we learned that public works officials in New York sent a self-propelled, submersible Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) down into in the 85-mile long Delaware Aqueduct that supplies New York City with half of its drinking water. Millions of gallons have been leaking, and they wanted to know where and how it was seeping out.Leakage of up to 36 million gallons a day was detected starting in 1991. The leaking stretch lies somewhere between the Rondout Reservoir in the Catskills and the West Branch Reservoir, a way station for city-bound water here in Putnam County.The escaping water is just a small percentage of the 1.3 billion gallons supplied by the system each day, but still equals the daily consumption in Rochester.Water percolating upward hundreds of feet from tunnel leaks has created wetlands and damp areas in Ulster and Orange counties that endure even in the region's worst droughts.The city's engineers have been periodically sending, as recently as last month, torpedo-shaped, deep-sea robots to monitor the cracks.There are important lessons about crumbling infrastructure and the importance of surveillance and maintenance in an age of peak water and climate change that no doubt could be extracted from here, but we have to move on.(Stuck Inflatable Zeppelin, part of a series of installations collectively called Sciame di Dirigibili by Hctor Zamora at the 2009 Venice Art Biennale. Photo by Stunned.org. Source.)So. Instead of leaving cute trinkets next to one's object of disgust, you go for the jugular.First assemble together a fleet of self-propelled, subterranean dirigible. Be sure that they can navigate through both water-filled tunnels and more airier ones. To be able to track their location and velocity, implant each one with an iPhone or any cheap, GPS-enabled mobile device.With maps of the negative labyrinth on hand, you let them loose. At designated strategic nodes, you phone them. They pause in mid-flight. Seconds later, they inflate and wedge themselves very tightly in the tunnel. If the tunnel is too big, then several of your dirigibles will clump together to ensure total blockage. And then finally, using the sewers' miasmic vapour as a reagent, their nylon skins fantamagically fuse with the tunnel walls and turn metallic, nearly diamond-hard. An hour or two later, manholes and storm drains begin venting your furious critique. A further hour or two, an artificial lake lays stagnant next to (or better yet, surrounds) the target building.Of course, the target needn't be a building. It could be a new plaza as anti-pedestrian as the Piazza Augusto Imperatore. Or an obscenely overbudget hyper-park. Or a grotesquely earnest memorial. Or a similarly ghastly public art installation whose aesthetics suggest it has time-travelled from the 80s. Whatever it is, you consider it a pestilential addition to the built environment in the same way your artificial lake is a deadly public health hazard.Not surprisingly, others with their own beef and their own agenda will copy your tactics. Sewers all over the world will be swarming with dirigibles, buzzing with the amplified hum of their tiny propellers. Artificial lakes will bubble up and vanish, rising and falling in accordance to the perennially shifting climate of architectural taste.Not surprisingly as well, officials will try to stop these acts of sabotage. They will take sewer maps out of the public domain. They will even request the federal government to classify them as state secrets. Consequently, all public works employees will have to undergo extensive background checks and sign non-disclosure agreements. Urban adventurers will be charged with espionage if found hiking through the tunnels. Or simply shot on site as they claw their out of the sewers like Harry Lime in The Third Man.If the public before were oblivious to the vast underground landscape that makes their life possible, only getting a hint of what lies beneath when an underpass is flooded or when a boy mysteriously goes missing while out exploring an abandoned section, then they will now be utterly, completely, permanently ignorant.When a boy does indeed go missing, there will be no search and rescue and thus no wall-to-wall television coverage of melodrama. There will be no prolonged national hysteria over the fate of the child, and there definitely will be no photogenic heros confected out of the whims of the masses. The missing kid will simply be censored from the day's news, and the parents will be told they never had that child. The kid, like the sewer maps, will be redacted.In response, sewer anarchists will outfit their dirigibles with DIY sonars or laser scanners. They will make their own maps.As a counter-countermeasure, combat engineers will reconfigure the network into an even more bewildering jumble of tunnels. They will dug fake tunnels, tunnel that leads to dead ends, tunnels that impossibly knot into themselves, tunnels with sonar-cancelling pings, tunnels that lead to police headquarters, tunnels that effloresce into a thicket of infinitely bifurcating tunnels, and tunnels that lead to other dimensions.Alternatively, they will de-tangle the network. Obsolete tunnels will be filled in, others consolidated. Certain segments will be expanded into rationally planned, naturally lighted, cathedral-like vaults. These tunnels will actually be more than what the city needs to funnel its wastewater and stormwater, but at least they will be hard to be barricaded. It's the Haussmannisation of the sewers.The other side, of course, will simply hack their dirigibles into more sophisticated mapping tools and employ advanced computer modeling techniques to simulate alternative infiltration strategies.It's one side always trying to outwit the other side.Because whoever rules the sewers rules the city. 7mootools - wowbox blog () [New Window]
Rdacteur invit sur LeCollagiste VJ : appel participation [New Window]
Vous tes VJ, vidaste, performeur, musicien, spectateur, spcialiste en temps rel, vous avez une bonne plume et surtout une bonne culture de la rtine et musicale, venez participer au webmag du LeCollagiste VJ sur la culture du VJing, je vous propose de rdiger des billets, des articles, des tests matriels ou tout simplement du retour dexprience. [New Window]
Romecore [New Window]
[Image: A Greenland ice-core at the Hayden Planetarium; for further reading, visit the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory. Photo by Planet Taylor, used under a Creative Commons license].Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.The Crypta Balbi is a relatively recent, low-profile addition to Rome's museum compendium. It's billed variouslyand confusinglyas a museum of archaeology, a museum of ancient Rome, and a museum of the Dark Ages. All of these descriptions are, in fact, cumulatively accurate, because the site is actually a city-block-sized core sample of Rome, threaded through with staircases, tunnels, and elevated walkways for visitors.Crypta Balbi is located in an irregular pentagonal plot in the Campus Martius, an area that, unlike many regions in the ancient city, remained largely inhabited through the Middle Ages. In fact, according to Filippo Coarelli's authoritative Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide, the Campus Martius was originally supposed to be kept free of buildings altogether and "reserved for military and athletic exercises." However, historian Suetonius describes the citys gradual encroachment, explaining that: "During his reign Augustus often encouraged the leading men of Rome to adorn the city with new monuments or to restore and embellish old ones."[Image: A satellite view of the city-block core sample, via Google Maps].As a successful military general and favored member of Augustus's entourage, L. Cornelius Balbus the Younger stepped up to the plate, building a theater and attached cryptaa rectangular porticoed walkway where the theater's scenery could be stored and around which the public might stroll, protected from the elements. Apparently, the Balbi Theater's grand opening in 13 BC took place during one of the Tiber's regular floodsmeaning that it was, briefly, only accessible by boat. Nonetheless, the Theater and Crypta thrived, and they are depicted intact on a chunk of the Severan Forma Urbis, an amazing 60'-x-43' incised marble map of the city created for public display in 203 AD.Eventually, Romes earthquakes, fires, barbarian raids, and radical population shrinkage (from a million people in 367 AD to just 400,000 less than century later) combined with architectural re-use and the passage of time to take their toll. There isn't much of the original Crypta left to seea reconstructed stucco arch, and the massive travertine and tufa walls that now serve as foundations for modern houses in Via delle Botteghe Oscure and Via dei Delfini.[Image: A fragment of the Forma Urbis, showing the Balbi Theater. For more on the Forma Urbis, visit the seemingly great but non-Mac-friendly Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae project].However, layered above the Crypta's original floor plan are traces of this city block's shifting usagea condensed narrative of Rome's destruction, accretion, and evolution. It is this series of transformations and reuses of both the Crypta and the urban space it occupies, rather than the fragmentary ancient ruins, that the museum aims to make visible. Like a series of stills from an impossible time-lapse film, the visitor who descends to the basement or climbs to the third floor can see this awkward cuboid chunk of city ruined, reshaped, reused, and reoriented over two thousand years of urban history.Equally amazing are the expansive historical detours prompted by even trace elements in the urban core sample. For example, as early as the time of Hadrian, a "monumental" public latrine was inserted into a section of the Crypta. From the quantity of copper coins that fell, and weren't worth recovering, archaeologists have extrapolated the amount of coinage in circulation in Western Europe during the latrine's life-span. (Astonishingly, it was only in the 19th century that small change was to be this common again in Western Europe).[Image: Museum display panel diagramming five distinct road levels wandering across the Crypta's ruins (apologies for the quick snapshot)].Two centuries later and a few feet higher, two graves bear witness to a city in ruins between the 5th and 7th centuries, as the prohibition against burial within city walls lapsed, and the dead were buried singly in abandoned buildings or beside roads. Ironically, in a museum that preserves the urban structures of each era equally, during the medieval period the Crypta actually housed one of the city's largest lime-kilns, where the marble inscriptions, statues, and building blocks of classical Rome were brought to be crushed and melted down into lime (a key ingredient in the cement needed to build the city's new Christian architecture).In the 1940s, the convent that had occupied the site for the past four hundred years was demolished for a planned new Mussolini-era construction, which thankfully never materialized. Finally, in the 1980s, the Soprintendenza archeologica di Roma authorized the excavation of the abandoned city block; and, in 2002, the northwest corner was opened to the public, even as work continues on the rest of the site.[Image: An interior view of the Crypta Balbi].Aside from the execution, which is excellent, the very idea of a museum built into an urban core samplea stratigraphic investigation of the shifting use of space over timeis incredibly exciting to me. Imagine a similar hollowing-out of urban space in Istanbul, Cairo, or Parisresidents as disoriented as tourists as they clamber through the hidden foundations and forms woven underneath and around their own city.In New York, this might even be an idea whose time has come: as The New Yorker pointed out in December 2008, the expiration of a residential construction tax-abatement law encouraged builders to dig foundation trenches early, so as to secure better financing, but the subsequent recession has put many of these projects on hold, semi-permanently."What will become of the pits?" asks Nick Paumgarten, speculating that they could turn into "half-wild swimming holes, like the granite quarries of New England" or even "urban tar pits, entrapping and preserving in garbage and white brick dust the occasional unlucky passerby." These are both attractive ideas, but with a little expenditure on zip-lines, elevated walkways, and interpretative signage, visitors could circulate around several millennia of Manhattan's history, from the collision of the North African and American continental plates to the tangled evolution of New York's water mains, via retreating glaciers and the housing bubble.Meanwhile, back in Rome and less than a mile away from the Crypta, engineers have teamed up with the Soprintendenza to sink several new urban cores, this time in the guise of excavating the elevator and escalator shafts for a new subway line.Angelo Bottini, director of the Soprintendenza, can hardly hide his excitement, telling the Wall Street Journal that, under usual circumstances, "We never get to dig in the center of Rome." Sadly, it seems as though most of the finds will be documented and then destroyed, due to a shortage of museum space and the already astronomical construction costs (an estimated $375 million for one mile of track in the city center).But how amazing would it be if the new subway station walkways and escalator shafts could themselves become Crypta Balbi-like museums of buried stratigraphy? Rome would be riddled with urban cores, awestruck tourists ascending and descending through sampled spatial histories across the city. Meanwhile the Sistine Chapel lies miraculously empty...[Previous guest posts by Nicola Twilley include The Tree Museum, The Water Menu, Atmospheric Intoxication, and Park Stories]. Links for 2009-07-03 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
Parrworld: The Collection of Martin Parr / e-fluxyeah yeah yeah! Martin Parr in ParisFoodprint / e-fluxThe Foodprint exhibition shows crucial moments relating to food, food production and the city through the work of artists and designers. Starting in the late 1960s artists have used food as a theme for tackling wider social topics. Gordon Matta Clark organized a restaurant as a meeting place. In Manhattan, Agnes Denes sowed a field of corn as a political statement: real estate versus food. More recently one comes across projects by Atelier Van Lieshout, centered around self-sufficiency, or Raul Ortega Ayala and Yang Zhichao, which focus on food in relation to ethical value systems.Activismo de corbata · ELPAÍS.comSu anuncio del fin de la guerra de Irak en un falso The New York Times tuvo un impacto planetario.Ahora, los agitadores Yes Men arreglan el mundo burlndose de petroleras y grandes corporaciones.L'exposition Martin Parr au Jeu de Paume - L'exposition Martin Parr au Jeu de Paume - 20minutes.frSTRP Festival, 2 - 13 April 2009, Klokgebouw EindhovenSTRP is pleased to announce that the fourth edition of the STRP festival will take place in April 2010 at the Klokgebouw in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. STRP is searching for exceptional work for presentation at the STRP festival, an international festival of art and technology. Creators of interactive art, robotics, visual projects, light art, and great experiences are invited to submit their work for possible inclusion in the festival. Create an s3Slider-like jQuery Plugin: New Plus Tutorial - Nettuts [New Window]
PHP fonctions, bibliothque de fonctions PHP [New Window]
Welcome To Twitch. Spreading the News On Strange Little Films From Around the World. [New Window]
Beautiful Examples of Vexel Artworks and Tutorials | Inspiration | Smashing Magazine [New Window]
jquery sliders [New Window]
The Lightbox Clones Matrix planetOzh [New Window]
A few bloggers, nude, each with a headless young child's large-finger-armed body attached by the neck to their chests, standing on a landscape [New Window]
(Or "A deformed young man, nude, with a headless young child's body attached by the neck to the chest of the young man, in the place of arms, the child has a large finger at either side of his torso; at right an inscribed pedestal," from Giovanni Battista de' Cavalieri's Monsters from all parts of the ancient and modern world, 1585. Source.)This month's wunderkammer of marvelous blogging:1) Critical Terrain, by Alan Rapp, editor of The BLDGBLOG Book, etc. (Also: @Kipple1.)2) Flores en el tico.3) Governors Island Blog. The island, in Upper New York Bay and legally part of Manhattan, is the site of a planned major series of public open spaces by West 8.4) Inspiration Wall, by Lisa Town. (Also: @lisastown.)5) Mark Lamster was formerly the anonymous author of The Gutter. (Also: @marklamster.)6) NL Architects Blog.7) Spillway, by Will Wiles, senior editor of Icon magazine. (Also: @WillWiles.)8) Urban Omnibus is an online project of the Architectural League that explores the relationship between design and New York City's physical environment. (Also: @UrbanOmnibus.)9) UrbanTick.For more, check out our public list of RSS feeds on Bloglines. KolibriShop.com [New Window]
Streetwear von Bench, Adidas & vielen anderen online kaufen Why do people desire walls? [New Window]
The audio file of a lecture by Prof. Wendy Brown who explains how the building of walls around the world today is so starkly at odds with images of a world that is ever more connected & unbordered. Bonus! Videos of Shooting Back, the project of an Isreali NGO that gives Palestinian families across the West Bank video cameras to document how they are treated by Israeli soldiers and settlers continue Links for 2009-06-22 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
Venice Biennale 2009: prize collector’s leap of faith - TelegraphTeresa Margolless multi-part installation uses caked, dried and liquefied gore collected at the sites of murders committed during the ongoing drug wars in Northern Mexico to drench the building in blood. Shootings and decapitations have claimed the lives of more than 7,000 people in the past 18 months alone, so she had plenty of material to work with. This work is dreadful in the real meaning of the word horrible, real, and unforgettable and a great work of art.New Songdo City: Atlantis of the Far East - Asia, World - The IndependentOn land reclaimed from the sea, South Korea is building a new city that aims to banish the problems of the modern world. David McNeill reportsMOTHERBOARD | Stelarc: The Man with Three Ears | VBS.TVVBS tv dropped in to get Stelarc thoughts on the present state of transhumanism and see what abominations of biological science hes been working on lately.Vodafone | receiver » Blog Archive » The rise of the sensor citizen – community mapping projects and locative mediaclose look at community mapping and sensing projects, and points out both the opportunities and challenges for activism made possible by locative technologies.Taking the war in Iraq to the American peopleA British conceptual artist, an Iraqi artist and a US soldier who served in Iraq travelled from New York to Los Angeles with the remains of a car destroyed in a Baghdad bomb attack in towHow FBI sought to block Deep Throat the movie | World news | The GuardianNow it has emerged that Deep Throat the Fed may have come across Deep Throat the movie during his time with the FBI. According to FBI files released following a freedom of information request by the Associated Press, the bureau worked furiously to try to thwart the 1972 movie.Jezebel - Abandoned Embryos And The Complexities Of Reproductive Technology - EmbryosWhat do you do with 2,000 abandoned embryos? Dr. Robert Anderson's answer to this question highlights how the simple combination of sperm and egg has become complicated in the age of reproductive technology.Cartografiando Gazajust received the material from the "Gaza Cartographies" workshop i curated for the University of Architecture in Alicante with hackitectura, I'm fucking proud of their work! you are awesome guys!Boran Burchhardt - Hamburger Moschee - "Darf ich ihr Minarett bemalen?" - Szene - art-magazin.deDer junge Knstler Boran Burchhardt verschnt zusammen mit Gemeindemitgliedern die beiden Minarette einer Hamburger Moschee im Stadtteil St. Georg.Academic women fight back against 'sexist' Silvio Berlusconi - Times OnlineWives of the world leaders due to attend next months G8 summit in Italy should boycott the meeting because of Silvio Berlusconis sexist and offensive attitude to women, a group of Italian female academics has said.Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima's Serpentine Pavilion: now you see it, now you don’t - Times OnlineThis years pavilion will be like a clearing between the trees, says its architects, Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima Links for 2009-07-02 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
Amnesty accuses Israel of Gaza war crimes - Middle East, World - The IndependentAmnesty called on Israel to publicly pledge not to use artillery, white phosphorus and other imprecise weapons in densely populated areas. And it urged Gaza's militant Hamas rulers to stop rocket fire against Israeli civilians attacks it also described as war crimes.Amnesty which first accused Israel of war crimes shortly after the fighting ended on Jan. 18 said "disturbing questions" remain about why high-precision weapons like tank shells and air-delivered bombs and missiles "killed so many children and other civilians."Criminally tasty: Britain's first prison restaurant - Features, Food & Drink - The IndependentOnce you've handed over your mobile phone and any sharp objects and been buzzed through the solid steel prison doors, a prison guard escorts you past 30ft-high, razor wire-topped walls, through barred doors, security gates and past CCTV cameras to an anonymous brown door. Stepping through it is like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia. You could be in any of the aforementioned West End venues. I had to walk back out again just to check I was still in a prison.The guilty secrets of palm oil: Are you unwittingly contributing to the devastation of the rain forests? - Environment - The IndependentDoes your shopping basket contain KitKat, Hovis, Persil or Flora? If so, you may be contributing to the devastation of the wildlife-rich forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, where orangutans and other species face extinction as their habitat disappears.Intro - Fatenahanimation movie: Inspired from a true story. Fatenah, a Palestinian woman who lives in Gaza Strip. Her simple wishes were her consolation in the absurd living situation around her. But when she discovers a lump near her breast, she will start a journey to save her dreams.Dailymotion - Interview de Douglas Repetto, intervenant à Lift - une vidéo Hi-Tech et Scienceyeah! douglasIl pacchetto sicurezza diventa legge Sì alle ronde, la clandestinità è reato - Politica - Repubblica.itunregulated immigrants are now officially criminals and mobs of 'concerned citizens' are allowed to patrol and ensure Italians are not bothered by us, nasty immigrantsmicromega - micromega-online » Against the Reintroduction of Race Laws in EuropeThe Berlusconi Government, using security as a pretext, has imposed on our Parliament over which it has total control the adoption of laws discriminating against immigrants, laws the likes of which we had not seen in this country since the passing of the Fascist Race Laws. The ExtraRoom, a space to achieve psychological alterations [New Window]
Directly influenced by the 50s and '60s experiments, ExtraRoom puts the sensory deprivation practice in a near futuristic scenario, when mind reading technologies are in common use and thoughts are not private anymore continue Yang Fudong and Erwin Olaf at the Photo Museum in Antwerp [New Window]
One of the reasons i visited Antwerp is that i had never seen the Museum of Photography. This is going to be one of my regular stops. The exhibitions i checked out last week are now closed but the upcoming ones look great continue Harun Farocki at LOOP video art festival [New Window]
The German independent filmmaker has been investigating the relationship between technology and information for decades. His talk in Barcelona explored the way blurry, raw images from surveillance and sophisticated computer-generated images are now competing with "the real thing" continue Green Revolution [New Window]
The artists brought together for this show reveal an imagery that has been inspired by the current mutations in our environment. They deal with diverse matters such as Chernobyl, global warming and the rise in oil rates. At times close to science-fiction, these artists imagine new stories which pay witness to the curiosity and fears derived from this changing reality continue Links for 2009-06-28 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
BBC - Earth News - Legless frogs mystery solvedScientists think they have resolved one of the most controversial environmental issues of the past decade: the curious case of the missing frogs' legs.Silvio Berlusconi: how does he do it? - TelegraphThere can't be many politicians who could survive the sort of scandals he's been through: accusations of perjury, perverting the course of justice, proximity to the Mafia, accusations of membership of a sinister masonic lodge, of tax evasion and of corrupting public officials. And now, on top of all that, it has been discovered that he's been enjoying Dionysian parties with dozens of young girls at both of his Sardinian and Roman villas. Annika Larsson at LOOP [New Window]
When i met the talented and sexy video artist in Barcelona we discussed forms of control, men desiring to perform the tasks of robots and why video artists shoudln't be afraid to share their work on you tube continue Encastrable, guerrilla art residencies inside DIY megastores [New Window]
At no cost at all, the young artists have at their disposal a huge array of material that they can grab, move, superimpose, and organize onto temporary installations and sculptures continue Fashion-able. Hacktivism and engaged fashion design [New Window]
Just found out that the utterly brilliant and fascinating thesis that Otto von Busch presented last year at the University of Gothenburg is available as an online PDF. So leave Dan Brown on the shelves and take this one on the beach this Summer, ok? continue Notes on the LOOP video art fair [New Window]
LOOP art fair understands the importance of the comfort factor for video art lovers. The fair took place inside the snug rooms of a 4 stars hotel right in the center of Barcelona during 3 afternoons. Videos were displayed on big screens inside bedrooms and some galleries added a smaller screen in the bathroom to show another piece. So here we were all cosying into armchairs, spreading over beds, taking notes in the dark and chatting in the corridors of the hotel continue Sound, DIY culture and mechanics at SonarMtica [New Window]
Given my notoriously campy taste in music, you will be relieved to know that i'm going to carefully avoid reviewing the music side of Barcelona's International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art. What's left then? Fashion, a bit of advertising and the SonarMtica exhibition continue Daimlerstrasse 38 or How to get a fox to shoot portrait of itself [New Window]
Danish artist and environmentalist Tue Greenfort's photo series, Daimlerstrasse 38 lured foxes living in the industrial area in eastern Frankfurt with frankfurter sausages towards a hidden camera continue Links for 2009-06-23 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
Retrato de la otra cara de África · ELPAÍS.comHace apenas una dcada, la fama del fotgrafo Malick Sidib apenas rebosaba los lmites de Bamako, la capital de Mal, donde en 1962 abri su estudio. Hoy, a sus 72 o 73 aos -naci en 1936 o en 1937, no hay datos precisos- sus imgenes viajan por todo el mundo, hace reportajes de moda para el New York Times Magazine y hace dos aos recibi el Len de Oro en la Bienal de Venecia.WSJ: Nokia, Siemens Help Iran Spy on Internet Users | Threat Level | Wired.comAccording to a somewhat confusing Wall Street Journal story, Iran has adopted NSA-like techniques and installed equipment on its national telecommunication network last year that allows it to spy on the online activities and correspondence including the content of e-mail and VoIP phone calls of its internet users.Subjective Atlas of PalestineArchive - David Roberts Art FoundationThe exhibition engages the concept and dynamics of the service and hospitality industries in today's political and social climate and brings together a wide range of artwork from emerging international artists.Wyer GalleryIn The Limitations of Logic, his second solo exhibition at Wyer Gallery, Alistair McClymont presents the second in his series of tornado installations. A new horizontal tornado occupies the whole front section of the gallery where a system of scaffolding, industrial scale fans and an ultrasonic humidifier project a twisting ten-foot funnel against the gallery window. The new installation features alongside drawings made by the tornado itself: works in ink on paper formed by the tornados movement across the sheet.The Furniture of Chandigarh - Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret at P3Currents of Time: New Work by Zineb Sedira at iniva - Institute of International Visual ArtsFloating Coffins was filmed on the little known but beautiful coastline of Mauritania, a bird watcher's paradise. It is also where the world's shipping is beached and broken up, drawing parallels with another of the region's characteristics - the habour city of Nouadhibou, which has become a point of departure for African migrants trying to reach Europe.AP-CAP 2009: 5th Asia-Pacific Computing & Philosophy Conference - call for papersAsia-Pacific Computing and Philosophy 2009 will be held on October 1st-2nd, 2009 in Tokyo, Japan. The conference will be hosted at the University of Tokyo's Sanjo Conference Hall. Keynotes speeches will be given by Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro (Osaka University), Professor Shinsuke Shimojo (Caltech), and Professor Luciano Floridi (Oxford University / University of Hertfordshire). This year, it will be held in conjunction with the Devices that Alter Perception workshop, which will form a special track.Werk Nu at z33War Book reveals how Britain planned to cope with nuclear attack | UK news | guardian.co.ukHistorian Peter Hennessy persuaded officials to release document kept ready for use from 1960s to 1990sDetroit UnReal Estate AgencyDetroit Unreal Estate Agency will produce, collect and inventory information on the unreal estate of Detroit: that is, on the remarkable, distinct, characteristic or subjectively significant sites of urban culture. The project is aimed at new types of urban practices (architecturally, artistically, institutionally, everyday life, etc) that came into existence, creating a new value system in Detroit. Image of the day [New Window]
For no particular reason continue Links for 2009-07-01 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
ArsLonga# 67 Avenue Parmentier - 75011 ParisAV Festival | AV Festival 10 Announcement and Call for ArtistsAV Festival, in partnership with Inspire Northumberland, seek to appoint an artist in residence at NaREC, the centre of excellence for new and renewable energy technologies in North East England, based in Blyth, Northumberland. Self-Portrait Machine [New Window]
Jen Hui Liao's Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model's help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait continue Links for 2009-06-30 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
Le Palais Stoclet, patrimoine mondial de l'humanité - lesoir.bewas about time!COLORS OF MONEY | FabricaThrough photography, creative writing, works of art and interactive installations conceived by Fabrica artists, Colors of Money provides an unorthodox insight into a world seizing from a growing financial crises. The exhibition simultaneously underlines the innovative response of social groups to the cultural dominance of finance, thus making a subject often considered as incomprehensible more accessible to young people, finance professionals and the general public.Mondoweiss: 'I think this is the most emotional event I've ever done' (Naomi Klein in Ramallah)Yesterday Naomi Klein gave a great talk at the Friends School in Ramallah. It was a short addendum to her January piece in The Nation supporting the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement against Israel. I recorded it in video, but it came out too shaky, so here's the audio in mp3, 35 min long.Israel opens mosaic museum in the West BankPalestinians are calling the museum unlawful. Based on prohibitions in international law, UN resolutions, the Oslo Accords and the Road Map, an Israeli museum or any Israeli building in the West Bank is illegal, Marwan Toubassi, the Palestinian deputy minister of tourism and antiquities, told The Art Newspaper.Video: Stuart Jeffries interviews French artist Orlan | Art and design | guardian.co.ukOrlan is mostly known for her work with plastic surgery in the 1990s. But Stuart Jeffries finds that she has a body of work that started long before - and one that is still evolvingHuman rights activists 'arrested' off Gaza coast - TelegraphHer fellow passenger Ms McKinney, a former US presidential candidate, said: "This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip."We're asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey."The Roma: Why we shouldn't fear Gypsies - Times OnlineAs Gypsies flee racists in Northern Ireland, a Briton who has lived among them in Romania and has a Roma son, calls for a solution to the economic plight Jimmy Kets at the Photo Museum in Antwerp [New Window]
Meet Jimmy Kets, one of the most brilliant photographers i've seen this year. He shot photo series around the world but the ones i found most remarkable were taken in Belgium continue Toys [New Window]
A fictitious company called ENT International has filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. Some of the items listed in the catalogue of the bankruptcy clearance auction are perfectly mundane, others are fictitious. Put together they offer a detailed insight into the inner workings of a large corporation closely inspired by the Enron scandal continue Today?s Autonomedia Jubilee Saint ? Mao Dun [New Window]
July 4– Mao DunFamed radical Chinese writer, journalist, cultural critic.JULY 4, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS*U.S.: Independence Day.*Flag-burning day*Hannibal, Missouri: Tom Sawyer Fence-Painting Day.ALSO ON JULY 4 IN HISTORY…1585 English colonists land on Roanoke Island, New World.1627 Virginia Colony orders scorched earth policy for neighboring natives.1776 Liberty Bell rings, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: not all [...]
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 00:14:10 -0500 @ : twittertwitter [New Window]
"twittertwittertwitter" ING @ Emakina [New Window]
Episode 2 Ralit augmente [New Window]
Lien Youtube Pub Audi par Psyop [New Window]
Lien Youtube Quelques chiffres [New Window]
Lien Youtube Halte au long [New Window]
Halte au Long Rocco Siffredienvoy par halteaulong Pub Heineken [New Window]
Lien Joyeux nol les poilus [New Window]
CamWithHer Xmas 2008par CamWithHer la crise et les marques [New Window]
Lien /src : Viktor History of the Internet [New Window]
Liensrc:Walkingmen La Saint-Valentin approche [New Window]
... et toutes ses promesses, vantes par la pub, que du bonheur pour nos mirettes ;) Agent Provocateur - Valentine's Daypar yom_ src : BLOGtendances Bruce Lee pour Nokia [New Window]
Lien Youtube Le meilleur job au monde [New Window]
Lien Preloaders [New Window]
Compilation de preloaders The art of David Ho [New Window]
The art of David Ho Ce matin aux USA [New Window]
Lien Pub Durex [New Window]
Lien World Builder [New Window]
Magnifique ...World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo. New York - Photo-montages [New Window]
Lien Victoria Silvstedt [New Window]
Pas facile grer tout ça .... Les BD du coeur [New Window]
" Monbeausapin.org est un site de bande dessinée en ligne, qui présente un auteur différent chaque jour. Le truc en plus, c'est que toutes les visites sont comptabilisées. Et juste avant Noël, grâce à son partenaire Orange, Monbeausapin.org versera à la Croix-Rouge Française une somme proportionnelle au nombre de visiteurs total. Ce don sera offert à l'opération "Arbres de Noël" de la Croix Rouge, afin d'offrir des cadeaux aux enfants défavorisés. Il n'y a rien à cliquer, rien à acheter, il suffit de venir lire de la BD, et en parler autour de soi ! N'hésitez pas à relayer l'information sur vos sites et blogs, ( une bannière Influenceurs est également  disponible ). Et n'oubliez pas que le don dépendra de la fréquentation du site ! " Flash & ralit augmente [New Window]
Trailer - Tokyo [New Window]
Compilation de 3 court-métrages des directeurs Michel Gondry, Leos Carax et Bong Joon-Ho Emakination [New Window]
Lien Ori-gami-ginal [New Window]
Origami In the Pursuit of Perfection from MABONA ORIGAMI on Vimeo. Truc de ouf [New Window]
Morphine - Honey White (live) [New Window]
Morphine - Honey White (live) (Flash Video 03:10). Mark Sandman died 10 years ago on July 3, 1999. [New Window]
Clementi - photos of Italy [New Window]
Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake 2009 [New Window]
Jennifer Sanchez [New Window]
Zen - Hair [New Window]
Dorothy Lathrop [New Window]
Barry Moser More here. [New Window]
Mayumi Oda More here. [New Window]
Kent WilliamsA new Rashomon poster for the revival screenings. [New Window]
Michael Korney [New Window]
Nights of Cabiria trailer [New Window]
Lisel Ashlock [New Window]
Vacation [New Window]
Ronald Searle slideshow [via The Vespiary] [New Window]
Denis Brown [New Window]
Paolo VeronesePeter Greenaway is doing a multimedia presentation on The Wedding at Cana at the Venice Biennale. [New Window]
Blip from Sean Mullen. [New Window]
Chema Madoz [A Google image search has more]. [New Window]
Gaslight Design [New Window]
Tomer Hanuka. A blog too. He did some work on Waltz with Bashir [New Window]
Dan Hillier [New Window]
Steven Tabbutt [New Window]
James Thurber cartoons [a Google image search] [New Window]
Wellington Nyanhongo [New Window]
Beatrice Braun-Fock and here [via Illuopa] [New Window]
Bee Flowers' Moscow Metro [more here and an explanation here] Lactualit du mois de Juillet [New Window]
Une application de VJing sur les tables SurfaceRichard Harper, David Kirk et Stuart Taylor, chercheurs Microsoft Cambridge ont dvelopp un prototype favorisant le mixage vido en temps rel. Pens pour la scne, VPlay propose aux video jockeys des manipulations directes avec du contenu multimdia. Lire la suiteDes rseaux sociaux de proximit [...]
Fri, 3 Jul 2009 14:37:07 -0500 Lift 09 : repenser linternet des objets [New Window]
Sil suffisait dajouter des chipsets, des antennes et dinjecter une nouvelle dose dinteractivit nos objets pour quils transforment lindustrie autant quinternet a boulevers le monde des mdias, linternet des objets ne passionnerait pas autant les futurologues ! Cest la confrence internationale Lift, rcemment organise Marseille avec la Fing, que les spcialistes de [...]
Fri, 3 Jul 2009 14:31:18 -0500 Lactualit en retard de Juin [New Window]
Un trackball insolite pour PlaystationLasse de jouer Katamari Damacy au joypad, Kelly Farrell a construit un contrleur alternatif plus proche du gameplay original. Dans lunivers djant du titre de Namco, un petit prince de 5 cm de haut roule une sphre agrgeant tous les objets avec laquelle elle rentre en [...]
Fri, 3 Jul 2009 14:27:24 -0500 The Midnight Movers/Y Society [New Window]
Merci Truth pour cette insertion.Thanks to Truth for that one. le sampl The Midnight Movers - Sacrifice le sampleur Y Society - This Advice... The Miracles/Marco Polo & Torae [New Window]
le sampl The Miracles - Give Me Just Another Day BUY THIS ALBUM WITH: le sampleur Marco Polo & Torae - But Wait Producer : Marco Polo BUY THIS ALBUM WITH: AND...... Jeffrey Osborne/Bless [New Window]
le sampl Jeffrey Osborne - Who Would Have Guessed le sampleur Bless - Talking To Me (feat Guru) Producer : Sid Roams... Mike Brant/Eminem [New Window]
le sampl Mike Brant - Mais dans la Lumire BUY THIS ALBUM WITH: le sampleur Eminem feat. Dr. Dre & 50 Cent - Crack a Bottle Producer : Dr. Dre BUY THIS ALBUM WITH: AND...... Janko Nilovic/Jay-Z [New Window]
le sampl Janko Nilovic - In The Spacele sampleur Jay-Z - D.O.A. (Death of Autotune)Producer : No I.D.... Michael Jackson/Little Brother [New Window]
Merci Zer0 pour ces deux insertions.Thanks to Zer0 for these two.le sampl Michael Jackson - Off The Wallle sampleur Little Brother - Nighttime Maneuvers Remix Producer : 9th Wonder... Shunsuke Kikuchi/Marco Polo & Torae [New Window]
NB : Shunsuke Kikuchi est le compositeur de la bande son originale de Dragon Ball Z.FYI : Shunsuke Kikuchi is the composer of Dragon Ball Z's japanese soundtrack.le sampl Shunsuke Kikuchi - Kamen Rider BUY THIS ALBUM WITH: le... Michael Jackson/9th Wonder [New Window]
le sampl Michael Jackson - Billie JeanMichael Jackson - Billie Jean le sampleur 9th Wonder - Beat @ 21:55... Alice Cooper/Slum Village [New Window]
le sampl Alice Cooper Shoe Salesmanle sampleur Slum Village - Fall in love (remix)Producer : Jay Dee... Selda/Mos Def [New Window]
le sampl Selda - Ince Incele sampleur Mos Def - Supermagic over Oh No's HeavyAND...... Yogi and the Stooges [New Window]
Talk about your Super Groups, who knew that Yogi Bear and the Three Stooges ever joined forces to make an album.....The Mad Mad Mad Dr. No-No, available at Dartman's World of Wonder. I didn't have the patience to sit through the entire story, but the opening song really rocked. Pre-Independence Day Grillin? Video: How Hot Dogs Are Made! [New Window]
How Hot Dogs are Made! - watch more funny videosNow that we’re at the height of the home-grillin’ season, it’s as good a time as any to revisit this Wonder Showzen classic, wherein the kids get to visit a hot dog factory! Who wants to swim in the meat pool?
Fri, 3 Jul 2009 11:15:03 -0500 Bloomsday [New Window]
Yesterday, as James Joyce fans will know, was Bloomsday: June 16th. The day Leopold Bloom made his famous walk around Dublin in Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. [Image: Street map of Dublin].Ulysses considered something of the ultimate in literary modernism, as much for its mythical remaking of everyday life as for its often impenetrable abstraction, presaging Joyce's later linguistic kaleidoscope, Finnegan's Wake was, for me, utterly transformed when my brother suggested that it was actually an attempt at descriptive realism.That is, should you want to describe a man's walk around the city in as detailed and realistic a way as possible, capturing every minor event and instant, then you would have to include the circumstances of that walk in their often bewildering totality: every fragmentary thought process, directionless flight of fancy, and irrelevant detail noticed along the way, via a million and one dead-ends. Things remembered and then forgotten. Deja vu. That daydream you had early today? That was, Ulysses suggests, part of the infrastructure of the city you live in. The city here becomes a kind of experiential labyrinth: it is something you walk through, certainly, but it is also something that rears up mythically to consume the thoughts of everyone residing within it. To say that Ulysses, then, is one of the most realistic urban novels ever written surely sounds like a joke to anyone not connected to academia yet, once the apparent absurdity of such a statement wears off, it seems utterly ingenious. After all, how do you map the city down to its every last conceivable detail? And what if cartography is not the most appropriate tool to use? What if narrative endlessly diverting narrative, latching onto distractions in every passing window and side-street, with no possible conversation or observation omitted is the best way to diagram the urban world? In such a constellated wealth of minor points, "realism" becomes a useless haze like listening to every conversation at a party simultaneously. And that's before you add internal monologues and descriptive details from the pubs and sidewalks all around you. In any case, there are many secondary points to make here. For instance, I'd actually suggest that the narrative position just outlined actually describes not a person at all but a surveillance camera that is, the Ulysses of the 21st century would actually be produced via CCTV: it would be Total Information Awareness in narrative form. But the whole point of this post was actually to ask two things:1) What if Ulysses had been written before the construction of Dublin? That is, what if Dublin did not, in fact, precede and inspire Joyce's novel, but the city had, itself, actually been derived from Joyce's book? At the very least, this would be an awesome proposition for a design studio: read Ulysses and then design the city it describes... The differing responses would be fascinating. Further, this raises the question of whether a city has ever been built, directly inspired by a work of fiction. Of course, you could stretch the term fiction a bit, and say that those fundamental fictions of a nation's founding myths might have inspired a city or an historic preservation district or perhaps you could even say, as if channeling Michael Sorkin, that the city's zoning code is itself a monumental act of narrative modernism. But what about an actual novel? If you can take, say, Moonraker by Ian Flemingand turn it into a film that is, Moonraker, directed by Lewis Gilbert then could you also take a novel here, Ulysses and turn it into a city? 2) If you fed Ulysses into a milling machine that is, if you input not a CAD file but a massive Microsoft Word document containing the complete text of Ulysses what might be the spatial result? Would the streets and pubs and bedrooms and stairwells of Dublin be milled from a single block of wood? What if you fed Ulysses through a 3D printer? Oddly, I'm reminded here of something that has long fascinated me: quipu, the so-called knot language of the Inca. Quipu, to make a very long story short, is a way of braiding strands of animal hair or colored yarn together, using specific types of knot; these knots, arrayed in specific orders, thus communicate things to others whether that's accounting information or perhaps even cultural myths. It was a form of writing, in other words, although its words were 3D shapes. As a brief aside, the possible paranoias of a quipu translator have always seemed particularly stunning to me: for instance, someone over-immersed in the world of Andean knot-languages becomes convinced that, in the drooping symmetry of a basketball net or in the shoelaces of strangers walking past on the street, there might be written messages: epic poems, secret codes, unintended diary entries. Instead of Freudian dream-analysis, you perform quipu knot-analysis, even examining the micro-fibers of strangers' clothing for hidden meanings... (It's worth mentioning that this exact idea actually appears in the unwatchably annoying film Wanted). In any case, I mention quipu here because I can't even believe how cool it would be if 3D printers might someday be used to create word-objects: little amorphous and abstract three-dimensional shapes that aren't just works of art, they are a new form of writing. Like quipu, they are 3D linguistics: words in space. The idea here that all those high-end design items you see lining the shelves of boutique shops in downtown Milan or Moscow or Manhattan are actually strange new, highly literal forms of communication, makes the mind reel. Spy films of the future! MI6's man in Havana goes into a specialty cookware shop where the salt and pepper shakers are not at all what they seem... Or, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, the FBI begins leaving little figurines in empty hotel rooms, knowing that the next guest will be an undercover informer and those abstract statuettes left behind in the cupboard actually encode the next location of rendezvous...And so on. So the point of this long tangent is this: if you fed Ulysses through a 3D printer, what might the resulting shapes be? What if the unexpected blobs and shapes could be considered a translation of the novel?[Image: Historical maker for the birthplace of Leopold Bloom in Dublin].Inspired by Bloomsday, then, it seems well-timed to ask not only how our cities can best be mapped and if narrative is, in fact, the ideal cartographic strategy but what other physical possibilities exist for narrative expression. Put another way: what if James Joyce had been raised in an era of cheap 3D printers? After all, given the possibilities outlined above, we might even someday be justified in concluding that Dublin itself is a written text, and that Ulysses is simply its most famous translation. When the ruins begin to sing [New Window]
[Images: Three aerial photos of suburban Arizona by Daquella Manera, used through a Creative Commons license].Malfunctioning fire alarms going off inside foreclosed homes have become a major distraction for fire departments in suburban Arizona, according to ABC15 News.Fire fighters, however, cannot legally enter a property unless they see smoke or have obtained the owner's permission. But in an era of bank ownership and rampant foreclosure, even finding the owners can take weeks. The result is that "neighbors have to listen to the alarm until the battery dies, which can take days."First we were surrounded by ruins, and then those ruins began to sing.(Thanks to Steve Silberman for the link!) A Parking Lot to Last 16,000 Years [New Window]
Perhaps proof that J.G. Ballard didn't really die, he simply took an engineering job at MIT, scientists at that venerable Massachusetts institution have designed a new concrete that will last 16,000 years. Called ultra-high-density concrete, or UHD, the material has so far proven rather strikingly resistant to deformation on the nano-scale to what is commonly referred to as "creep."This has the (under other circumstances, quite alarming) effect that "a containment vessel for nuclear waste built to last 100 years with today's concrete could last up to 16,000 years if made with an ultra-high-density (UHD) concrete." (Emphasis added).So how long until we start building multistory car parks with this stuff? 16,000 years from now, architecture bloggers camped out for the summer in rented apartments in Houston the new Rome get to visit the still-standing remains of abandoned airfields, dead colosseums, and triumphal arches that once held highway flyovers? 16,000 years' worth of parking lots. 16,000 year's worth of building foundations. Perhaps this simply means that we're one step closer to mastering urban fossilization. (Thanks, Mike R.!) Building Storm [New Window]
The spatial adventure of home foreclosure continues: empty homes in the U.S. hurricane belt run the risk of becoming "wind-propelled debris" should they be hit by a future storm. As the Associated Press reports, "communities at the epicenter of the nation's housing crisis are coming to realize that this year's hurricane season, which began this month, represents yet another pitfall." In other words, "hurricanes could make hazards of thousands of foreclosed-upon houses" turning those homes into airborne projectiles. Building-storms. After all, the AP asks, "who will secure all the foreclosed homes if a storm does approach?"It must be an eery feeling, I'd suspect, when you realize that all those empty houses sitting around you might someday be weaponized: latent storms of wood and vinyl siding just waiting for the moment when they can pick up and whirl through the streets, like something out of Transformers 3.So do you tear the houses down in advance of a storm that might never arrive? Or do you surround your own house with vast nets and deflection shields for protection against the inevitable debris? Ironically, though, as Steve Silberman who first sent me this link points out, there is simultaneous interest in using these very foreclosed homes as hurricane shelters. As the Florida Courier points out, this idea, if implemented, would also "address a source of concern among emergency specialists in Florida: the growing number of vacant homes that could be splintered into construction debris by a hurricane if no one secures them with shutters and plywood." [New Window]
A quick reminder that I am @bldgblog on Twitter. Many more links and ongoing conversations appear there. Serving Space [New Window]
Tom Vanderbilt author of the excellent book Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America, as well as the recent Traffic, and subject of a short but interesting interview in The BLDGBLOG Book has a long article out in the The New York Times Magazine about the architecture (and energy implications) of large-scale data centers. This is the world of "increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers" that now dot the global landscape. What is this new type of space? "Call it the architecture of search," Vanderbilt writes: "the tens of thousands of square feet of machinery, humming away 24/7, 365 days a year often built on, say, a former bean field that lie behind your Internet queries." Such buildings often blend in with the everyday urban landscape. For instance, Vanderbilt describes "NJ2, a data center located in Weehawken, N.J., just through the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan." It is "an unmarked beige complex with smoked windows"; inside it "hum the trading engines of several large financial exchanges."The interesting thing here is that the machines stored inside NJ2 are stored there so that they can be as close as possible, geographically, with other machines: the ones that handle trades on Wall Street. Spatial proximity, in this case, cuts down on information-relay time, thus enabling large-scale financial processes to unfold nearly in real-time. We might say, then, that the built environment you see here the distances between buildings and their urban or geographical locations is thus an articulation not of architectural theory or of the stylistic assertions of one particular architect, but of the processing power of today's supercomputers. Future changes in processing speed might then ramify outward to further tweak the built environment. Vanderbilt explains that when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange moved its computers north, into NJ2 a distance, we read, of 80 miles they saved three milliseconds on every trade. Lest we laugh that off as the spatial equivalent of obsessive-compulsive disorder, we're told that "it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazons sales by 1 percent."It's an awesome article check it out if you get a chance. Architects in Bangalore [New Window]
Why a firm based in Bangalore could be so unbelievably stupid that they think leaving dozens and dozens of comment spam messages on BLDGBLOG is a way to drum up business is beyond me but, should you be looking for awful work produced by morons, then be sure to waste your money hiring a Bangalore-based firm that has comment-spammed an architecture blog near you. The exact acoustic shape of the skies above Los Angeles [New Window]
[Image: Photo by John Gay: an F/A-18 creating a condensation cone as it surpasses the speed of sound. Via the Daily Mail].An email was sent out last week from the Regional Public & Private Infrastructure Collaboration Systems (RPPICS) an organization with no web presence warning many businesses in and around Los Angeles that city residents "could hear up to a dozen sonic booms this morning [June 11] as some NASA F/A-18 aircraft fly at supersonic speeds around Edwards Air Force Base."While the "loudness of the booms will vary," we read, these are only "preliminary calibration flights for an upcoming NASA study" that will research how "to reduce the intensity of sonic booms." Part of this will be studying "local atmospheric conditions," including air pressure, wind speed, and humidity, as these all entail acoustic side-effects. It's a sonic cartography of the lower atmosphere: an echo-location exercise. The geometry of noise. Sound-bombing L.A. from above in order to know the exact acoustic shape and structure of the sky. #skyfail [New Window]
Like an inversion of J.G. Ballard's first novel, The Wind From Nowhere in which winds blow to hurricane strength around the world, flattening cities, decimating civilization, and making readers wonder why the book wasn't simply written as a short story it seems that winds across the continental U.S. are slowing down.[Images: Three covers from J.G. Ballard's first novel, The Wind From Nowhere: "London and New York reduced to rubble," the cover on the right side reads, "as nature goes mad"].As The New York Times reports, "wind speeds in the United States have dropped 15 to 30 percent over the course of about 30 years." There is absolutely no reason to assume that this trend will continue at the same pace but, should it, the winds of America would come to a stand-still within just four or five generations. One of the suspected reasons behind this atmospheric deceleration is climate change, the NYT explains:As polar regions warm faster than the Equator... the temperature difference between them and the pressure differential shrinks. And, lower pressure differences mean slower winds.Of course, it shouldn't be surprising, meanwhile, that, "in scattered pockets of the country, wind speeds have risen." These sorts of changes are rarely homogenous: a cooling trend in one spot is matched by a warming trend in another; the death of breezes in one location is counteracted by increased number of hurricanes elsewhere. Nonetheless, how interesting to speculate what might happen if the atmosphere gradually did fail, falling still, forming the aerial equivalent of a glacier: hazy and unmoving, polluted and heavy, a kind of anti-hurricane with no less deadly effects in the long term. Certain plants would no longer pollinate. International travel, by both sea and air, would become unpredictable. The use of fossil fuels would skyrocket. I do wonder, then, if Ballard, given another few years in which to write, might have tried out this kind of anti-storm scenario, describing a world without aerial movement. The death of the sky. Whoever Rules the Sewers Rules the City [New Window]
UCLA's cityLAB has launched a new design competition called (somewhat lamely) WPA 2.0, where the WPA refers to the Works Progress Administration. But the competition itself looks cool. Its tagline? Whoever Rules the Sewers Rules the City. It's a call for new visions of urban infrastructure:We encourage projects that explore the value of infrastructure not only as an engineering endeavor, but as a robust design opportunity to strengthen communities and revitalize cities. Unlike the previous era, the next generation of such projects will require surgical integration into the existing urban fabric, and will work by intentionally linking systems of points, lines and landscapes; hybridizing economies with ecologies; and overlapping architecture with planning.Sounds good in the abstract, but what are they specifically looking for? Quite a range:This notion of infrastructural systems is intentionally broad, including but not limited to parks, schools, open space, vehicle storage, sewers, roads, transportation, storm water, waste, food systems, recreation, local economies, "green" infrastructure, fire prevention, markets, landfills, energy-generating facilities, cemeteries, and smart utilities.Judges include Stan Allen, Cecil Balmond, Elizabeth Diller, Walter Hood, Thom Mayne, and Marilyn Jordan Taylor two of whom (Allen and Diller) I'm proud to say that I've served I've been on design juries with in the past. Here's the competition brief as a downloadable PDF. Read more at the competition website and good luck! Acqua Veritas [New Window]
The city of Venice has begun to rebrand its tap water, calling it Acqua Veritas, in an attempt to woo both residents and tourists away from the environmental hazards (and waste collection nightmare) of bottled water. After all, Italians are "the leading consumers of bottled water in the world," the New York Times reports, "drinking more than 40 gallons per person annually." Further, "Venices tap water comes from deep underground in the same region as one of Italys most popular bottled waters, San Benedetto" so turning Venetians on to the miracles of the tap (and setting an example for cities elsewhere) is clearly overdue.However, as we saw earlier on BLDGBLOG, in a guest post by Nicola Twilley, bottled water now sits on the cusp of becoming as pretentious as the wine industry, complete with a developing vocabulary for taste preferences and even an emerging geography of aquatic terroir. In other words, it will be hard to break the Duchampian habit of seeking water in a bottle. Why Duchampian? Because bottled water is the ultimate readymade object; I'd even suggest that Marcel Duchamp very nearly discovered the bottled water industry when he first captured 50 cc of Paris Air, in an artwork of the same title, back in 1919.[Image: Marcel Duchamp, 50 cc of Paris Air (1919), courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art]. It's hard not to wonder what might have happened had Marcel Duchamp been alive just slightly later, and able to exhibit his artwork alongside or even simply to hang out with Andy Warhol; combine the readymade object with Warholian mass reproduction, substitute pure glacial water for Paris air, and perhaps today we'd all be drinking L'Eau de Duchamp. In any case, if cities around the world engaged in marketing campaigns similar to this one in Venice, however tongue-in-cheek it may be, might people finally regain interest in their own municipal water supplies? Croton Silver: The Taste of Manhattan.(Vaguely related: The next bottled water industry? Chinese Air Bars). [New Window]
Consistent internet access has been hard to come by these past few days, post-Rome, so posts have suddenly come to a standstill but I'll have new material up ASAP... More soon. Quick List 12: Of buried machines, ice tunnels, and stratigraphic euphoria [New Window]
[Image: Photo of the Atlantic Avenue train tunnel taken by Joshua Lott for The New York Times; see below for more information].In the interest of cleaning out a long file of recommended links, here's a quick list of stories that I've otherwise missed:Two brothers in Louisiana are ridding their property of 40-year old levees: "In what experts are calling the biggest levee-busting operation ever in North America, the brothers plan to return the muddy river to its ancient floodplain, coaxing back plants and animals that flourished there when President Thomas Jefferson first had the land surveyed in 1804.""Flu pandemics may lurk in frozen lakes," Wired Science warns. "The next flu pandemic may be hibernating in an Arctic glacier or frozen Siberian lake, waiting for rising temperatures to set it free. Then birds can deliver it back to civilization." I'm reminded here of the novel Cold Plague by Daniel Kalla, which I somewhat inexplicably read on a plane ride from New York to San Francisco this spring; the book's story goes that a bottled water company has begun to ship and sell drinking water pumped from Antarctica's subglacial Lake Vostok a lake briefly mentioned in BLDGBLOG's earlier interview with Kim Stanley Robinson only to discover that a prion is in the water, causing irreparable brain damage and eventual death in everyone who drinks it... In any case, the Wired Science article quotes a scientist who "thinks migrating waterfowl regularly deliver influenza viruses to Arctic glaciers and lakes, where it becomes frozen in ice. When the ice melts, birds pick the virus up and transport it back south where it can infect humans." Amazing. Nature's secret virus cycles. While we're on the subject of ice, check out this brief video shot inside the tunnels beneath Greenland's melting ice sheet: "Unique video footage taken hundreds of metres inside the ice has revealed a complex subglacial network of interconnecting tunnels that carry water from the surface to deep inside the ice sheet," we read in the Guardian. These tunnels, however, are one of the primary threats to the very existence of the ice sheet, lubricating the glacier's accelerating slippage off of Greenland's rocky base.Two cool links from Noah Shachtman's Danger Room: "Military Scientists Explore Planet Hacking" (also see the climate change chapter of the The BLDGBLOG Book for more) and "Scientist Looks to Weaponize Ball Lightning" (perhaps the future of global warfare will look not unlike medieval sorcery, hurling lightning at one another from desert mountaintops).[Image: Lightning storm over Boston, ca. 1967; photo courtesy of NOAA's NOAA's National Weather Service Collection].Adventures in applied acoustics: according to a short article in Mother Jones, "Dangerous red tides that kill fish and marine mammals and are toxic, even carcinogenic, to humans, might be destroyed using bursts of ultrasound." Audio warfare installations lining the Gulf Coast will vibrate red tides out of existence. Krispy Kreme doughnuts which I was shocked to see all over Melbourne, Australia, on my visit last month aren't just bad for your arteries: "doughnut grease and other waste from a plant in Lorton have clogged up the county's sewage system, causing $2 million in damage." In fact, "The muck got so bad that a nearby pumping station began reeking of doughnuts, and a camera inserted into one of the pipes 'got stuck in the grease, preventing inspection of the remainder of the line'." The Lorton mentioned here is Lorton, Virginia but I suspect they'll start seeing the same problems Down Under...Finally, many people will already know the story behind the discovery, in 1980, of the Atlantic Avenue train tunnel in Brooklyn, an underground viaduct that had otherwise lain abandoned beneath the city. If you don't know it, the story is awesome. Now, however, Bob Diamond, the man who discovered the tunnel, believes that there's yet more down there to find: "Behind a wall in the tunnel, near Atlantic Avenue and Hicks Street, he believes, there is a steam locomotive lying on its side like an abandoned toy train, in 'pristine condition, a virtual time capsule.' And he wants to dig it up." I absolutely love the idea of exhuming buried machines from the surface of the city. I'm tangentially reminded of the bizarre story of the Air Loom Gang in which an "influencing machine" controlled by British Parliament was accused of exerting mind control upon the citizenry only re-imagining that story today, with a kind of modernday James Tilly Matthews convinced that the buried enginery of the city around him has begun to influence the thoughts of all the people he knows... He descends into the tunnels and basements of the city, armed with ground-penetrating radar, performing magnetic archaeology on every wall and floor, detecting the hulking, Lovecraftian shapes of machines whose existence other people so vehemently deny. In any case, I'm thrilled by the idea that, somewhere beneath your own apartment complex, in the stratigraphic euphoria of the city, there might be an abandoned train in fact, there's an earlier post here on BLDGBLOG about something remarkably similar. (Links via delicious.com/bfunk, delicious.com/rgreco, delicious.com/javierarbona, and Steve Silberman. Previous Quick Lists: 11, X, 9, 8, etc. etc.). NYNEX, Embedded Angel of New York City [New Window]
[Image: The original fire house from Ghostbusters, seen here via Google Street View].Every once in a while it's rumored that there will be a Ghostsbusters III the current rumor being that Judd Apatow might produce and so, today, while walking around the National Gallery of Modern Art here in Rome, in a state of 100 exhaustion, I got to thinking about what would make an interesting plot if BLDGBLOG were somehow hired to write the screenplay.And this is what I came up with:It's 1997. NYNEX is on the verge of being purchased by Bell Atlantic, after which point it will be dissolved in all but name. But all hell starts breaking loose. Pay phones ring for no reason, and they don't stop. Dead relatives call their families in the middle of the night. People, horrifically, even call themselves but it's the person they used to be, phoning out of the blue, warning them about future misdirection.Every once in a while, though, something genuinely bad happens: someone answers the phone... and they go a little crazy.Thing is spoiler alert halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel a fallen angel and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan.Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first.It's worth recalling, in fact, that NYNEX at least according to Wikipedia actually stood for New York/New England, "with the X representing the unknown future (or 'the uneXpected')." It's like Malcolm X's telephonically inclined, wiry cousin.So the phone system of Manhattan all those voices! all those connections! leading one life to another starts to act up, provoked by its dissolution into Bell Atlantic... and the Ghostbusters are called in to fix it.Fixing it involves rapid drives from telephone substation to telephone substation, from library to library, all while Dan Ackroyd's character keeps receiving phone calls about a family crisis... his ex-wife is calling... his dad is calling... they're urging him to stop this whole, crazy Ghostbusters business... He starts acting funny. The voices on the phone say strange things. They call at strange hours. He feels kinship with public pay phones; they sometimes ring as he walks past. He tries to call his family back but they're not answering.Harold Ramis starts to suspect something.In the background there are shadowy figures called out to fix transmission lines but they are actually wiring something up... something big...The whole movie then leads up to the granddaddy of them all: an electromagnetic confrontation inside the windowless, Brutalist telephone switching tower at 33 Thomas Street (rumored haunt of the ghost of Aleister Crowley).[Image: 33 Thomas Street, via Wikipedia, "is a telephone exchange or wire center building which contains three major 4ESS switches used for interexchange (long distance) telephony..."].The opening scene: a pay phone on a sun-splashed street near Washington Square Park. You can see the famous arch in the background.A man is sitting nearby, outside a deli. He's got a bagel and a coffee and he's reading the New York Times.The phone starts to ring. He looks at it. It rings and rings.He gets up, finally, and approaches the phone and he answers it.It's his dad.But he thought his dad was dead.Ghostbusters III. The city's telecommunications system is not some mere collection of copper wires and fiber optics, the film will suggest; it's actually the subtle anatomy of a barely understood supernatural being, an angel of rare metals embedded in the streets of Manhattan. Somewhere between AT&T and H.P. Lovecraft, by way of electromagnetized Egyptian mythology.These metals, Harold Ramis will explain, pushing up his eyeglasses, also correspond to materials used in pre-Christian burial rituals throughout Mesopotamia. Copper coffins. Traces of selenium found in embalming tools. He refers to Tiamat, dragon of multiple heads, and he draws mind-bending parallels between Middle Eastern mythology and the origins of NYNEX. NYNEX/Tiamat. NYNEX/Michael. NYNEX/Metatron.Certain members of the audience think the whole thing sounds like bullshit. But they like the special effects. And who cares, anyway.So the movie will involve everyone from Guglielmo Marconi to Thomas Edison to Alexander Graham Bell (he's the "ultimate sorcerer," Dan Ackroyd exclaims, laughing along with the rest of us), and it will make reference to the hundreds of architecturally interesting telephone substations scattered throughout the greater New York region.It's voodoo meets urban infrastructure by way of Avital Ronell. Architecture students will flock to see it.Infrastructural historian Kazys Varnelis will even appear on Charlie Rose with the film's director to discuss the telephonic prehistory of Manhattan.Having seen the film, people will long for the days of pay telephones when, according to the film's mythology, you were actually using the body of an angel to make local phone calls.Within the film, then, there are also brief scenes of excavation a kind of angelic archaeology wherein Bill Murray digs through the plaster of tenement walls in search of ancient trunk lines. But he accidentally breaks into the plumbing.At one point, he and Ernie Hudson drive north along the Hudson, discussing Christian archangels, afraid to use the car phone, looking for some kind of old anchorage point for the phone system. They think maybe they can just shut the whole thing off.They are surrounded by dark trees and the scenography is breath-taking.Harold Ramis then uncovers a diagram of city streets and the exact locations of NYNEX lines; these line up with other diagrams from some Central European grimoire that he finds down in the basement of the New York Public Library.They're getting close, in other words.And that's when they discover 33 Thomas Street.In any case, the film is released in the summer of 2012 and it's a runaway blockbuster. It's "a return to American mythmaking," A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times, and there's immediate talk of a Ghostbusters IV.Manhattan is the wired center of a vast, global haunting, a transmission point crisscrossed by whispers above a magical infrastructure no one fully understands.Ghostbusters III: hire me, and I'll write it! I don't think it'd be a bad movie, actually.(Thanks to Enrique Ramirez for first telling me that you can see the Ghostbusters fire house on Google Street View). Origin and Detour [New Window]
It's hard for me to read stories about human origins without feeling like there's some kind of agenda at work, buried just beneath the surface. Modern humans are not African at all, the Piltdown hoax would have had us believe; our ancestors, lost to deep time, were in fact properly English, an anthropological pseudo-discovery that came just in time, its advocates hoped, to help save the British Empire's reputation... or at least to boost a few specific careers. Nonetheless, I'm something of an addict for stories about human origins.[Image: A portrait of the Piltdown forgery in action, by John Cooke (1915); Richard Fortey's recent book Dry Storeroom No. 1 has a great chapter on Piltdown].Caught up in all of this are the fantasies of belonging that different origin stories allow us to project upon the present. For instance, if you feel at home in the grasslands of South Dakota, can you say it's because you are "from" the plains of Africa? Or, if you love living in the American southwest, is it because humans really originated in the desert valleys of the Middle East? You're simply sensing that deeper attachment?In this context, the eroded riverine landscape of Olduvai Gorge has become something of the ultimate origin point for all of us, giving geological form to an idea so extraordinarily abstract (our very origins as living creatures) that its value is at least as much rhetorical as it is scientific. I mention all this, though, because an article published earlier this month in New Scientist suggested that modern humankind's primordial African ancestors might themselves have been immigrants having walked south after a much earlier and, until now, undocumented evolutionary appearance in Europe. Referred to casually as an "into Africa" scenario as opposed to an "out of Africa" one this would mean that "our ancestors lived in Europe and only later migrated to Africa, where modern humans are thought to have evolved."Europe, in this model, is the origin, Olduvai Gorge a mere inn along the way. I don't mean to overplay the possible political interpretations here although I do want to say again that I simply cannot read stories like this without wondering what might be at stake in the acceptance of their conclusions, and if there isn't a certain amount of wish-fulfillment going on (finally, Europe is the center once again!) but do check out the original short article for more. At the very least, it's worth asking what might happen if we do make it all the way down to the very point of human origin to that germinal site of all future reference and emanation only to discover that it's a meaningless detour. Beneath the foundations, are there always deeper foundations?(Also on BLDGBLOG: Early Man Site). Coil [New Window]
[Image: From OnSite.12, Bed Supperclub, Bangkok (2009) by Sebastien Wierinck].Sebastien Wierinck's public furniture projects seem to lend themselves to some interesting misinterpretations. For instance, when I first saw the two projects pictured here I thought not only that they were one project, but that they were the black tentacles of some kind of furniture-laying machine.[Image: From OnSite.12, Bed Supperclub, Bangkok (2009) by Sebastien Wierinck].In other words, I thought, a tangle of black tubes suspended from the ceiling would, when needed, come coiling down to take the shape of whatever furniture you desired at the time: a bench, a table, a love seat, perhaps even a rug.When you no longer need that particular chair, bench, or nightstand anymore, the coils would simply rewind upward into a canopy of tubes (or perhaps even be withdraw themselves into a machine somewhere in the center of the room, like what's pictured in the first image, above).[Image: From OnSite.14, Transmediale, Berlin (2009), by Sebastien Wierinck].After a long day at work, then, you would walk into your house which has no permanent furniture and you'd see a shimmering mass of black tubes swaying in a slight evening breeze above your head. You'd push several buttons, and the system would begin to move, drooping down in long loops and turning back and forth in tight corners and curves, all laying out the forms of temporary furniture bed, table as you get ready for a quiet night at home.[Image: From OnSite.14, Transmediale, Berlin (2009), by Sebastien Wierinck].Of course, this admittedly somewhat willful misinterpretation of the evidence at hand is not entirely wrong: after all, though Wierinck's pieces don't uncoil from the ceilings in ad hoc patterns, forming zones of temporary furniture throughout empty interiors, they are meant to be (literally) flexible, (somewhat) mobile, and easy enough to reprogram for other spaces. But what a beautiful thought: that you could walk into an empty room, hit a few buttons, and then watch as custom, temporary furniture is 3D-printed into the space all around you. Like a strange rain coming down from the ceiling, or the materialization of a dream, usable shapes gradually form and then you sit, book in hand. On demand, from above.(Spotted on SpaceInvading). London Yields, Harvested [New Window]
Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.As Geoff mentioned last month, London's Building Center hosted a daylong seminar at the end of May called London Yields: Getting Urban Agriculture off the Ground. [Image: From London Yields: Urban Agriculture].The speakers covered a lot of terrainso, instead of a full recap of the event, the following list simply explores some of the broader ideas, responses, and questions about urban agriculture that stood out from the day's presentations.1. Becoming public policyThe event was introduced and moderated by David Barrie, a sustainable development consultant, who framed the day as a collective opportunity to brainstorm ways in which urban agriculture could be moved from mere "sustainable accessory" to become a standard practice of both everyday life and city design. Interestingly, Mark Brearley, Head of Design at Design for London (DfL) and the day's first speaker, provided confirmation of Barrie's diagnosis, confessing that food production was a recent add-on to many of their open space projects. Why? "Because people were asking us about it," he said.Brearley's presentation was an overview of DfL's hundreds of urban regeneration and infrastructure improvement projects; these are, in themselves, interesting but, in aggregate, somewhat exhausting. However, as an office of the London Development Agency, working on behalf of the Mayor of London, Brearley was able to provide a fascinating insight into some of the current institutional priorities that need to be satisfied before urban agriculture can become a standard part of London public policy. For example, DfL's main interest in food production today is in terms of its "public engagement potential" and their primary stumbling block is how to measure the scaleability of local initiatives. Any London-based urban agriculture projects hoping for a mayoral blessing, take note!2. Food is a design toolThe second speaker was Carolyn Steel, author of the excellent book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. Hungry City traces how food has shaped both the city and its productive hinterland throughout history, from the Sumerian city of Ur to today's London via the markets and gates of ancient Rome. Steel provides a wide-ranging historical look of food production, importation, regulation, and culture, before putting forward her own intriguing and potentially revolutionary proposition: what would happen if we consciously used food as a design tool to create a "sitopic" city? Steel's coinage here, sitopiafrom "sitos" (food) and "topos" (place)is derived from her realization that "food shares with utopia the quality of being cross-disciplinary... capable of transforming not just landscapes, but political structures, public spaces, social relationships, [and] cities." And because "food is necessary," a sitopian city (unlike its utopian cousin) would remain tied to reality and of universal relevance.The quotations above come from Steel's book, however, rather than her lecture; twenty-five minutes was enough time to provide fascinating examples of food's role in shaping cities and urban life, but, sadly, not enough to explain (let alone explore) further thoughts about food's use as an urban planning tool. More to come soon, I hope, on this topic...[Image: Ebenezer Howard's original scheme for the Garden Cities of To-morrow shows a landscape reimagined in terms of food production and supply. As Carolyn Steel explains in her own book Hungry City, Howard's plans relied on land reform that was never carried out, and the garden cities of today (Letchworth, Welwyn, etc.) are, as a result, little more than green dormitory suburbs].3. Partnerships as infrastructureAnna Terzi, who runs London Food Link's small grants scheme for Sustain, was the day's third speaker; she described one of their current projects, demonstrating how key insights from both Mark Brearley's and Carolyn Steel's talks might look in action.Sustain (a nonprofit alliance for better food and farming) is currently poised to create borough-wide institutional change by partnering with Camden Council and Camden Primary Care Trust (part of the National Health Service). This alliancewith its intriguing implication that the National Health Service might be the one institution with the most to gain by promoting urban agriculturespeaks to the impact of creating new interest groups for locally grown food. By partnering with institutions responsible for dealing with established urban challengesissues such as public health, economic growth, community engagement, waste, and environmental sustainabilitygroups like Sustain have the potential to take urban agriculture from decorative hobby to investment-worthy infrastructure.The Camden partnership's report (still in draft stage) aims to outline a relatively coherent and holistic food program for the borougha plan that promises to use food to reshape at least this part of the city, in terms of promoting social enterprise, meeting infrastructure needs, and reducing health inequalities.[Image: A lemon grown in Dulwich; photograph by Jonathan Gales (2008), Bohn & Viljoen Architects].4. Mapping and visualization toolsThe last two presentations of the day agreed that successfully producing food in the city requires a detailed resource inventory combined with effective promotion efforts. Mikey Tomkins, a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton, described systematically mapping the rooftops, grass patches, vertical faces, and vacant lots of Elephant & Castlewhereupon he discovered that 30% of the area's food needs could be met through the cultivation of found space alone. Architects Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen, creators of the uninspiringly named CPUL (Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes), emphasized the need to think about spare inventory in terms of population and three dimensionality (their Urban Agriculture Curtain filled a display window one floor above us). Their research techniques included the accumulation of census data and questionnaires combined with GPS mapping and site visits in order to analyze a landscape's food production capacity.Both Tomkins and Bohn & Viljoen also showed several projects intended to help people read the city in terms of food, using tools as diverse as "edible maps" of London and visual analyses of urban agriculture in Havana, to installations and public events, such as the Continuous Picnic. This was a day-long event, part of the 2008 London Festival of Architecture, that included an "Inverted Market" (bring your own locally grown fruit and vegetables to be admired, judged, and then prepared), as well lessons in "Community Composting"; a giant public picnic then spread throughout Russell Square and Montague Place, with connecting corridors between. Meanwhile, for his Edible Maps series, an example of which appears below, Tomkins targets a new type of urban resident: the "food-flneur," who, map in hand, "could start to picture... the grassed areas around housing, the corners of parks, or the many flat rooftops of this quarter of Croydon spring into life with psychogeographic food."Another example of urban agriculture as an opportunity for community activation was Croydon Roof Divercity, Tomkins's collaboration with AOC (previously discussed, along with other AOC projects, on BLDGBLOG here).[Image: From Mikey Tomkins's series of Edible Maps, this guide represents the area around Surrey Street car park, site of Croydon Roof Divercity, in terms of inventory and potential yield].5. Easy, cheap, and somewhat under controlBoth Anna Terzi and Bohn & Viljoen recognized the difficulty of maintaining urban agriculture projects, once the initial novelty has worn off. Bohn & Viljoen are currently working on a twelve-step program to prevent relapse, while Sustain are offering ongoing practical and financial support to new food growing spaces in London through their Capital Growth initiative.Throughout the morning, David Barrie repeatedly registered his concern that urban agriculture needed to be economically viable, not just an upscale $64 Tomato lifestyle choice. Several of the presenters added a layer of nuance to Barrie's formulation, noting that cheap food has simply had its costs externalized and hidden (Carolyn Steel) and that organizations like the New Economics Foundation are developing the much-needed tools to measure urban-agriculture-created value, such as increased community engagement and environmental sustainability, which is currently perceived as intangible and qualitative (Katrin Bohn). Mikey Tomkins argued against an economics-based one-size-fits-all approach to urban agriculture, explaining that the scale of a food growing project determines its possible benefits. Thus differentiated, food gardening generates educational and quality of life outcomes and should be measured accordingly, while market gardening creates recycling benefits, and urban agriculture can be evaluated in terms of yield.Finally, the elephant in the room was the degree of coordination and regulation needed to transform London into a food-producing landscape. In an environment where, as Carolyn Steel said, the supermarkets where Londoners buy more than 80% of their groceries refused to participate in consultations with the Mayor's London Food Strategy, it seems unlikely that sustainable food production and distribution will become the norm without legislative intervention. In her book, Steel quotes Cassiodorus, a Roman statesman who wrote: "You who control the transportation of food supplies are in charge, so to speak, of the city's lifeline, of its very throat." At the moment, Steel tells us, roughly 30 agrifood conglomeratesunelected, and with no responsibility other than to their shareholdershave almost unfettered control over London's food supply. Until that changes, urban agriculture can't help but remain "at the artwork stage"an inspiring, attractive, and completely optional extra.[Previous guest posts by Nicola Twilley include Watershed Down, The Water Menu, Atmospheric Intoxication, Park Stories, and Zones of Exclusion]. [New Window]
A few quick things while I have a signal here: I was very, very happy to see that The BLDGBLOG Book made it onto SEED Magazine's "Books to Read Now" list, and I enjoyed Jim Rossignol's honest review of The BLDGBLOG Book, as well. Pick up a copy here, if you don't have one yet. In less self-interested news, I arrived back in London last night to find a huge stack of mail including Vicente Guallart's recent book Geologics, published by Actar, ETH Studio Basel's brand new MetroBasel comic book (available in English), and the most recent issue of MARK Magazine. Also, I will unfortunately not be able to attend this, but tonight, 3 July, down in Bermondsey, Blueprint Magazine is hosting a design picnic to celebrate their own newest issue stop by if you get the chance!And provided I can magically slice open the structure of the day and find two extra hours waiting patiently for writing, I will get some regular posts up again this weekend. The Danger of Digging Deeper [New Window]
Artificial earthquakes triggered by deep-crust drilling operations have always been of interest here, and The New York Times brings the idea back into the media cycle today with a new article complete with a sidebar titled "The Danger of Digging Deeper." Don't miss the interactive graphic.[Images: Geothermal projects and earthquake clusters in northern California; graphics by Hannah Fairfield, Xaqun G.V., James Glanz, and Erin Aigner for The New York Times].So the scene this time is the countryside two hours north of San Francisco, with a company called AltaRock. "Residents of the region, which straddles Lake and Sonoma Counties," we read, "have already been protesting swarms of smaller earthquakes set off by a less geologically invasive set of energy projects there. AltaRock officials said that they chose the spot in part because the history of mostly small quakes reassured them that the risks were limited."Serious seismic problems arise when you begin to tap into and then break through very deep rocks. The reference case for The New York Times here is something that happened in Basel, Switzerland, back in 2006 (a seismic event mentioned briefly in The BLDGBLOG Book). The specific drilling technique used in Basel, we read, was one that "created earthquakes because it requires injecting water at great pressure down drilled holes to fracture the deep bedrock."The opening of each fracture is, literally, a tiny earthquake in which subterranean stresses rip apart a weak vein, crack or fault in the rock. The high-pressure water can be thought of loosely as a lubricant that makes it easier for those forces to slide the earth along the weak points, creating a web or network of fractures.A very similar technique, however, will soon be put into widespread use in northern California. There, in the foggy hills and forests, AltaRock "has received its permit from the federal Bureau of Land Management to drill its first hole on land leased to the Northern California Power Agency, but still awaits a second permit to fracture rock."One resident awesomely points out: If they were creating tornadoes, they would be shut down immediately. But because its under the ground, where you cant see it, and somewhat conjectural, they keep doing it.Artificial tornadoes! The U.S. wind industry should take note. [Image: Artificial terrain rises from below... A screenshot from Fracture by LucasArts]. In many ways, I'm reminded of the game Fracture by LucasArts, in which "terrain deformation" is deployed as a central part of gameplay. You use weapons like Tectonic Grenades to generate new and temporary, but militarily significant, geographic features: hills, valleys, moraines. Putting these two stories together, though, perhaps an interesting plot emerges... You find yourself driving north out of San Francisco one fall, hoping to do some hiking but the further north you go, the more you notice slight tremors. Every few minutes, there's an earthquake and some of them are rather large. Soon, things start to look unfamiliar. You thought you knew this landscape from previous travels, but it no longer looks quite right. There are hills where you don't remember hills being. The road itself, freshly paved and by all indication brand new, weaves and winds around lulls and rises that aren't marked on the map and the map was printed six months ago. Finally, you reach your hotel around nightfall, only to experience another set of small earthquakes shake the ground. The clerk laughs as you try to sign for your room, because your signature comes out all wobbly as another temblor strikes. Your suitcase falls over. "Am I gonna get any sleep tonight?" you ask, trying to play it funny. But then, at 7am the next morning, your investigations begin...Turns out, in a geologically-themed science fiction film directed by Roger Donaldson, from a screenplay by BLDGBLOG, that deep drilling operations by a foreign geothermal consortium have been "unlocking" certain well-faulted portions of subsurface bedrock; huge masses within the earth's surface then rise or fall, slipping sometimes quite quickly, thus drastically altering the visible landscape... and causing thousands of earthquakes each year. The surface of the earth is being rearranged from below.In any case, check out the New York Times for more. (Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the tip!) Infrastructural Anxiety [New Window]
An article by Sebastian Rotella in the L.A. Times this past weekend presented readers with an interesting example of what might be called infrastructural interpretation. [Image: Photo by ohhector, available through a Creative Commons license].On the one hand, Rotella suggests a fascinating way to explore the spatial role of the European train station in 20th century political thrillers. Citing the novels of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John Buchan, and referencing early Alfred Hitchcock films, Rotella demonstrates how it might be possible to foreground certain architectural forms the train shed, or, perhaps, the multistory car park, the highway flyover, or the maximum security prison in the process of writing cultural histories. A short history of novels partially set inside planetariums. A spatial history of films set in shopping malls... with an introduction by Zach Snyder. In this case, of course, it'd be a political microhistory of the European train station and someone could very easily get a PhD out of such a scenario: The Train Shed as Depicted in Film, Games, and Literature: An Architecture of Encounter. But the second point of interest here for me is more political. And that's the fact that, for something published in the United States and in Los Angeles, no less, kingdom of the private automobile the article exhibits a depressingly obvious distrust in the municipal spaces of public transport. In other words, the article goes on to describe the European train station and train travel more generally as a threatening bastion of non-white otherness that has infiltrated the modern city. Moroccans, after all, live near certain train stations... and Muslims sometimes ride those very trains... "Moreover," Rotella points out, "train stations tend to be in working-class immigrant areas where desperadoes find shelter, weapons, false documents and other tools of the trade. The Gare du Midi, on the southern edge of downtown Brussels, is a good example. A few Spanish and Italian shops remain from previous migrations, but the personality of the neighborhood today is Moroccan and Turkish."Indeed, Rotella further suggests, that otherwise unthreatening train station near you might even serve as spatial host to a "leftist-Islamic militant alliance" never mind the fact that Islamic terror is almost universally committed against traditional leftist political goals (whether this refers to freedom of speech and the separation of church and state or to gay rights and female suffrage). But Al-Qaeda, in this way of interpreting European train infrastructure, is something like the passenger from hell Islamic militarism is Europe's Kenny Hampson, one might say, running amok aboard the Terror Train, exploding bombs on high-speed routes and "slaughtering" innocent bystanders. [Image: The horror! It's Terror Train. In the future they might even serve couscous]."Trains, stations and the gritty neighborhoods that surround them are often the backdrop to danger," Rotella warns. Specifically, "trains and their stations have played a key role in modern-day plotting and attacks by Islamic terrorists."Of course, Mike Davis's recent history of car bombs might offer a slightly different take on the relative dangers of various transport infrastructures but I digress. This would never happen in the United States, the subtext of Rotella's argument seems to suggest, and it never will... provided we never build more public train stations. In this context, President Barack Hussein Obama's tentative interest in funding an American high-speed train network takes on rather spectacular political implications at least as long as one lives in fear of a "leftist-Islamic militant alliance" being forged amongst the screaming wheels of modern railroad yards.Osama bin Laden is alive and well... and securing more funding for Amtrak. One man, we actually read a man accustomed to train travel and with a penchant for political violence "drank tea and ate couscous while allegedly hatching multimillion-dollar holdups, arms deals, money-laundering schemes and terrorist plots." He ate couscous "in the kebab joints" near Belgium's Gare du Midi, and he daydreamed scenes of near-supernatural violence. He would arrive upon the world stage, enshrouded in robes of blood. In any case, I don't mean to sound over-eager to ridicule this story; after all, train stations are heavily populated sites of public gathering, and thus very effective targets for terrorist plots. But does this also make them terrorist breeding grounds? Can train stations really represent both the secular invasiveness of big-government bureaucracy and violently independent religious conservativism? Rotella's implication here that all train stations are somehow, in and of themselves, infrastructural acts of invitation to a vampiric immigrant presence that secretly hopes to inflict evil, thus equating train travel with international Islamic terrorism seems very obviously motivated by ideology, not intellectual clarity or rational analysis. Which is too bad, because a cultural history of the train station as a site for political intrigue and so on actually sounds incredibly interesting to me. At the very least, one could start a Wikipedia page for "political plots hatched in train stations," or "murders committed in parking garages," or "bombed shopping malls" focusing on the infrastructural spaces within which certain major types of crime have been planned or committed. Even more specifically, is there a spatial taxonomy for spy stories and what types of structures seem repeatedly to appear?Alas, Rotella's article seems too besotted with AAA to view train travel as anything but a threat to national security. Launch [New Window]
[Image: All systems go... Original photo by Jim Grossman, courtesy of NASA].This is just a quick note to get the word out, but I'm falling out of my chair excited to announce that The BLDGBLOG Book which is finally shipping throughout the English-speaking world, it seems, with people emailing from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the United States to say that their books have arrived will officially go live on Tuesday, July 7, with a two-hour launch party hosted by the Architectural Association and sponsored by Wired UK.Here are the details:The BLDGBLOG Book Global Launch PartySponsored by Wired UK @ The Architectural AssociationTuesday, 7 July 2009 | 6-8pm36 Bedford Square, LondonFree and open to the public | Cash barPlus special guest(s) to be announced! And here's a map.The basic gist of the evening is to show up, grab a drink at the AA bar (they serve Leffe, one of my favorite beers), take a look at some of the awesome student projects that will be on display that night throughout the building as part of the AA's year-end exhibition (so bring a notebook! there will be cool ideas all over the place and students who deserve the attention), and then wander downstairs to the bookshop and dining area, in the basement, where the "launch" itself will take place.So come by, have a drink, talk to people, flip through the book, purchase a copy from the AA bookshop, get it signed, do whatever it is that you want with it enjoy the images, read the interviews, rest your beer on it, show it to people and just sort of hang out till 8pm or so, when it all comes to a close. It's not formal, and it's not a lecture. If the weather's nice, you can even step outside and enjoy the blue skies of Bedford Square. Meanwhile, I owe a gigantic thanks to Brett Steele, director of the AA, for hosting this event and Thrilling Wonder Stories last month; to Ben Hammersley, associate editor of Wired UK, for his own interest in all things BLDGBLOG and for bringing me on board last month as contributing editor at the magazine; and to Liam Young, who was absolutely instrumental in seeing these plans come together.Hope to see you there and expect a very long post next week about The BLDGBLOG Book itself, which I'm excited to introduce to everyone, finally, now that is has officially hit the shelves. Infrastructure as Advertisement [New Window]
For $200,000 a year, guaranteed for 20 years, totaling no less than $4 million, you could have the second-busiest subway station in Brooklyn named after you... or your product. This station, "the nexus of subway stops at Atlantic Avenue, Pacific Street and Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn," we read in The New York Times, is about to be sold, however, to Barclays, becoming Barclays Station. They can call it anything they want, as long as my trains on time, one regular commuter quips but to what extent is that really true? [Image: The Chrysler Building a sponsored building montaged by Flickr-user Chalky Lives].For instance, the same article cites several rejected proposals for the renaming of urban infrastructure but $4 million is not, in many contexts, even a very large sum of money. Super Bowl ads famously cost as much as $6 million dollars a minute in which case $4 million for twenty years' worth of public exposure is almost absurdly underpriced. In fact, the average marketing budget of a Hollywood blockbuster could quite easily absorb the cost of renaming a minor New York City subway station for the next decade well into that film's second life of digital sales, that is and, to use another example, buildings are still known as, say, the Die Hard Building twenty years after the fact, even if they were never official renamed. Somewhat bizarrely, for instance, I read literally just today that screenwriter Joe Eszterhas was paid $3 million, in 1992 dollars, for writing Basic Instinct but he could simply have had a Manhattan subway station named after him. Eszterhas Central.Perhaps Shia LaBeouf should forego monetary payment altogether for the next Indiana Jones film and get a new freeway in Los Angeles named after him. In any case, as private sponsorship of public space becomes the urban norm, will we see acts of infrastructure becoming little more than spatially immersive forms of corporate advertisement? If a Stephen King novel coming out next year had a small bridge in Maine named after it for the next twenty years the It 2 Bridge surely this would not be a bad way to give King's novel near-permanent cultural exposure? Put another way, why buy one minute of Super Bowl time when you could buy twenty years' worth of high-density urban exposure, associating a certain sidewalk, bridge, museum, or subway station with you and/or your product? I'm reminded of the recent news that Kentucky Fried Chicken had branded paving installed atop Louisville potholes fixing the city's broken streets even while reminding everyone who lived there where they could buy fried breast meat.Jason Kottke points out, after all, that institutions such as Rockefeller Center and Columbia University are also sponsored, in the literal sense that their names were allocated way back when based on who supplied the money. The Chrysler Building is another obvious example. In the end, then, if you went to work each day boarding the subway at Terminator Salvation Station, surely at least for someone born today, taking that commute in twenty years' time wouldn't even seem that strange?Sponsor a tectonic plate. Sponsor a moment in time. Sponsor fifteen minutes of foreign bombing: "Aid raids over Afghanistan today were brought to you by Target..." When will urban or national infrastructure simply become another form of advertisement? Perhaps it won't even be long before we start sponsoring lifeforms newly discovered rain forest birds named after a Latinized version of Bayer, or entire new microorganisms engineered from scratch in university labs, named after the next film from Pixar. (Via @nicolatwilley and kottke.org). IceLink / Land Bridge / Yesterday [New Window]
[Image: From "IceLink: Occupying the Temporal Seam" by Lateral Office].In their submission to the recent competition to design a bridge across the Bering Strait the Bering Strait Connection Toronto's Lateral Office proposed "IceLink: Occupying the Temporal Seam."Lateral Office, of course, are also the brains behind the excellent blog InfraNet Lab, as well as the designers of both the Air Unit and the awesome Runways to Greenways plan proposed for Iceland and IceLink is no less interesting than either of those. [Image: From IceLink by Lateral Office].First, for those of you who did not see the original call for projects, the Bering Strait Connection described itself as a "project attempting to connect two continents":In a wide sense, it includes building a tunnel or a bridge at both ends of the strait, extending [the] existing railways of the United States and Russia, and laying a world highway around the coasts of the world, which requires a massive amount of construction.Architects were asked to design "a peace park with a bridging structure using the two islands, Big Diomede and Little Diomede at the Bering Strait," and a "proposal of how to connect two continents."[Image: From IceLink by Lateral Office].In response to this, then, Lateral proposed: "1) a tunnel/bridge hybrid that runs along the international date line and accumulates diplomatic programs, and 2) a seasonal ice park that harvests ice floes into a global water vault." A global water vault: it's ideas like this that make me love architecture. [Image: From IceLink by Lateral Office].So the site, of course, would straddle two very different timezones: that is, both today and tomorrow (or today and yesterday). If I wasn't living in a temporary apartment right now, and thus without access to my books, I would quote from Umberto Eco's intellectually pessimistic novel The Island of the Day Before. There, we read how a shipwrecked scientist repeatedly fails to come to grips with the temporal (and epistemological) fact of his maritime abandonment along the international date line. But, perhaps to the benefit of my readers, I can't. Instead, let me also mention The Cryptographer, a novel by Tobias Hill. While it would be hard actually to recommend the book, it's nonetheless worth mentioning Hill's use of the international date line as an origin point for a currency-destroying computer virus: the Date Line Virus. Hill's Date Line Virus spreads westward with the ticking of the clock or the turning of the earth erasing digital savings and scrambling all systems of measured economic value. That is, the world's entirely computer-based monetary system, hour by hour, goes mad. Clearly, then, from even only these two examples, the narrative possibilities and intellectual stakes of the international date line are fairly interesting to draw on. Or, for instance, check out this factoid, from that well-known source of scientific accuracy, Wikipedia:For two hours every day, at UTC 10:0011:59, there are actually three different days observed at the same time. At UTC time Thursday 10:15, for example, it is Wednesday 23:15 in Samoa, which is eleven hours behind UTC, and it is Friday 00:15 in Kiritimati (separated from Samoa by the IDL), which is fourteen hours ahead of UTC. For the first hour (UTC 10:0010:59), this phenomenon affects inhabited territories, whereas during the second hour (UTC 11:0011:59) it only affects an uninhabited maritime time zone twelve hours behind UTC.For two hours, in other words, there are three different days happening on the earth simultaneously. But what about the spatial possibilities of the international date line? How can this strange temporal fissure in the planet's political and cultural landscape be taken advantage of architecturally?[Image: From IceLink by Lateral Office].IceLink, its designers write, without much surprise, "seeks to capitalize and highlight [the Strait's] unique geography, climate, and context." However, they add, "The intent here is less to impose a new landscape in this context than to emphasize the sublime conditions already existing. Currently, the Bering Strait is a seasonal barometer of the impacts of climate change. The intent with this scheme is to offer spaces with which to reflect on the correlation between natural environments and their occupation."This is where we come to the project's "two primary infrastructural elements: a tunnel-bridge link and an ice park."[Image: From IceLink by Lateral Office].The so-called "Bering Link" half of the project would consist of "bundled infrastructures," the architects explain; these infrastructures would span a distance of 85km, from Dezhnev, Russia, to Wales, Alaska. In the process, the Bering Link would skirt the Diomede islands, and even travel north-south atop the date line for 4km. Alongside this would be a series of new buildings, "concurrent with the international date line."Public and cultural programs intermittently rise above the bridge while research and education programs hang below the rail/road. Significant programs include a new United Nations headquarters, World Water Council headquarters, an Arctic Museum, and extensive oceanographic and meteorological facilities.It's a little hard to believe that the United Nations would move its headquarters to the middle of the Bering Strait after all, thriller-reading Christians know that they'll soon be moving it to Baghdad but it's a pretty ingenious move to put the World Water Council headquarters out there. Why? Here we come to the second half of Lateral's project: the "Bering Ice Park," a kind of floating archive and index of global climate change:Sea ice is often trapped between the Diomedes prior to drifting northward. The new park seeks to enhance and highlight this phenomenon. The Bering Ice Park will cultivate, collect and distribute ice floes. The extent of the park is defined by the Diomedes coastlines facing the international border and date line as well as natural ocean currents movement north.I'm reminded of BLDGBLOG's earlier look this month at the terroir of drinking water, in a guest post by Nicola Twilley: might specially cultivated Date Line Water from Lateral's Bering Ice Park someday arrive on the tables of high-end restaurants the world over? As it happens: no. The project described here did not manage to find a place amongst the finalists of the design competition. To see what did make the cut, take a look at the results over at Bustler.(Lateral's Air Unit makes a brief appearance in The BLDGBLOG Book so if you haven't yet picked up a copy, be sure to do so soon!) The Tree Museum [New Window]
Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.Every tree is a living archive, its rings a record of rainfall, temperature, atmosphere, fire, volcanic eruption, and even solar activity. These arboreal archives together reach back in time over centuries, sometimes millennia. We can even map human history through themand onto themtracing famines, plagues, and the passing of our own lives. [Image: A scene from Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo, with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in Muir Woods, outside San Francisco, where Novak points to the concentric rings of the redwood trunk and says, "Here I was born... and here I died"]. For artist Katie Holten, trees were thus the natural starting point for an oral history of a city street in the Bronx. To mark the 100th anniversary of the Grand Concourse, a four-mile-long boulevard that connects Manhattan to the parks of the Northern Bronx, Holten has created the Tree Museum: 100 specially-chosen trees between 138th Street and Mosholu Parkway, each of which has a story to tell if you dial the number at its base. The museum opens today, June 21, with a parade and street fair: for those of us not in New York, a podcast and brochure will be available for download, and you also can view each of the tree locations on Google Maps.[Image: Trees in the museum each have their own sidewalk marker, which gives their name and extension number].Only a handful of the one hundred "story-trees" date from the Concourse's construction, when an avenue of Norwegian maples was planted to shade carriages and pedestrians strolling along the broad boulevard. In an email conversation, Holten explained to BLDGBLOG that most of these original trees were moved to Pelham Bay Park when the B/D subway line was built in the early '30s. Twelve of the surviving maples are joined in the Tree Museum by representatives of fifty-nine other tree species, from an Amur Corktree in Joyce Kilmer park to a Kentucky Coffeetree just south of Tremont Avenue. In fact, each tree is carefully identified by its species name, in Spanish, English, and Latin, to draw museum visitors' attention to their variety. Holten told me that, early on in her community outreach, she realized how important naming the trees would be when a teacher in a local school confessed, incredibly, that it was only after he heard about the Tree Museum idea that "he noticed the next time he was walking that there were different kinds of trees. Before that he'd thought they were just 'trees'." [Image: A section of the Tree Museum map; a much larger version can be seen here].The trees were chosen for their variety, Holten says, but also for "location, age, and connection to a particular person or story." Holten acted as matchmaker, pairing trees with former and current Bronx residents, as well as scientists, authors, and activists who have worked in the area. Among the 100 participants are well-known former Bronxites DJ Jazzy Jay and Daniel Libeskind, students at the Bronx Writing Academy, and Jonathan Pywell, Bronx Senior Forester, who helped Holten identify all the trees (not an easy task in mid-winter). Each has used their tree as the starting point for a personal anecdote, snippet of neighborhood history, song, or even a digital sound recording. Taken together, the tree stories are part shared history, part personal memory, part science lessonthey form what Holten describes as "the whole ecosystem of the street."[Image: A computer-generated image of Klaus Lackner's prototype "synthetic tree," which would remove carbon dioxide directly from the air; image courtesy of Columbia University].In her email, Holten went into some detail describing the range of stories you can hear as you dial each tree's extension, from the sound of a Puerto Rican tree frog (No.73, a Gingko) to a local preservationist describing how he fought to turn an abandoned lot into the park that now surrounds No. 100, a Cottonwood. From her email:Klaus Lackner (professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University and director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy) tells the story of the carbon cycle and his attempt to create a "fake plastic tree," or air extractor, that would suck the CO2 out of the air and convert it into something we can put in a safe place. Eric Sanderson (a landscape ecologist based at the Bronx Zoo, and author of Mannahatta) needed a really old, native tree to talk about projecting the landscape backwards. I gave him No. 9, a beautiful American Elm outside Cardinal Hayes High School. At the northern end of the Concourse, at 206th St, there's a huge chunk of rock between two buildings; it's like the side of a cliff. I had to give the tree there, No. 95, to Sid Horenstein, a geologist who recently retired from the American Museum of Natural History. He's able to use the rock outcrop to explain the story of what the Concourse lies aboveit was built on a ridge and that's one of the main reasons the street was constructed here, because it was elevated and offered spectacular views of the countryside all around. And Tree No. 45, a Little Leaf Linden, has a story told by Patricia Foody, a 95-year-old Bronxite. She remembers her dad bringing her for a walk to the Concourse to visit his brother's tree in just this locationit was one of the original maples, and many of them had plaques for soldiers who had died in World War I.Some of the stories come from people who work with the trees directly: Jennifer Greenfeld, director of Street Tree Planting for the Parks and Recreation department, uses No. 66, a Chinese Elm, to provide an overview of street trees throughout New York City and the policy battles they sometimes cause. Barbara Barnes, a landscape architect also with the Parks department, puts her tree in the context of the historic street tree canopy project she's working on, to replant Joyce Kilmer and Franz Sigel parks as they were originally laid out. [Image: Eric Sanderson pointing at a map of the Bronx; photo by Katie Holten].For other participants, the trees function as more of a backdrop for personal history and community activism. Sabrina Cardenales is the real-life model for the character Mercedes in Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, which documents extreme urban poverty in New York: both Sabrina and Adrian introduce themselves and read a passage from the book as part of the Tree Museum. Meanwhile, Majora Carter, an environmental justice activist and MacArthur fellow from the south Bronx, uses tree No. 6, a honey locust, to tell people: "You don't have to leave your neighborhood to live in a better one, and trees are an important part of making that happen." The variety of voices and stories Holten describes accumulate into a sense that plenty of people really do care about these trees, this street, and the Bronx in general. They also act as a series of nudges to look at the urban landscape in a new light. The result is that the Tree Museum, at least in theory, will recreate some of the optimism of the Grand Concourse's roots in the City Beautiful movement, while not glossing over the struggles and setbacks faced by the "Champs-lyses of the Bronx" ever since. [Image: The Bronx Grand Concourse, looking north from 161st Street; photo by Katie Holten]. As part of the Concourse's centenary celebrations, the Bronx Museum and New York's Design Trust For Public Space are running a competition called Intersections: Grand Concourse Beyond 100, to gather new proposals for regenerating the street. Although the call for entries period is now closed, Katie Holten has set up a community forum for the Tree Museum, and clearly hopes the project will prompt action, as well as reflection. Holten explains her most basic hope, which is that the Museum will encourage people to start using and enjoying their shared public space again:One hundred years ago the Concourse was built for people to stroll along, under the shade of the trees, but in 2009 it takes quite an effort to get people out for a walkhopefully well get them strolling! There are a number of individuals who I met because they are interested in trees, or in "green" issues, and we've tried to use the momentum of the Tree Museum to help them make differences. For example, Fernando Tirado (tree No. 88) is district manager for Bronx Community Board #7 and he's been prompted to establish a "Greening the Concourse" project. He's organizing summer internships for youth in the area: giving them a job and training, and at the same time actually greening the street.Perhaps more importantly, Holten's Tree Museum (which she describes as "practically invisibleit's part of the urban fabric") demonstrates an intriguing way to re-imagine the landscape: finding ways to make the hidden layers and connections of a street's story visible (or audible) might ultimately be as, if not more, important than installing a new swing set in the park. [Previous guest posts by Nicola Twilley include Watershed Down, The Water Menu, Atmospheric Intoxication, and Park Stories]. Anita Carter - Blue Doll [New Window]
Anita Carter - Blue Doll (Flash Video 02:14). Johnny Cash claimed that she was "the greatest female country singer of them all." Also... Jim Reeves... Blue Boy (1958, RCA Victor 47-7266 .mp3 audio 02:12). Farrah Fawcett [New Window]
The other girl, besides Princess Leia that the girls wants to be and the men still want, has died.Farrah had the hair: The t&a show that had a pro-female message: She only did one season. It seemed like she did more.And the Poster.She had a long and solid career, earning Emmy nominations for the Burning Bed, Small Sacrifices and The Guardian. She won a Golden Globe for Extremities, which she also appeared in Off-Broadway.Rest In Peace, Farrah. SURPRISE PARTY (back) [New Window]
SURPRISE PARTY (back) Originally uploaded by el estratografico ....and Marlene Dietrich on Musical Saw [New Window]
Seems like she ahould be backed by Billy Butlin on spoons and Sir Kenneth Clark on bass saxophone, but apparently it's really Marlene herself playing "Aloha Oe" on musical saw.thanks to Rummage Through the Crevices Let's Spend Some Money! [New Window]
Bryan's Lounge is doing its part to help stimulate the economy by offering a mess of swell production music tunes you might have heard at the local E. J. Korvette's or Woolworth's circa 1960. Although it has the effect of making me want to go out and buy some hair nets or some Tangee orange lipstick.There's even a tune called Tater Tot Parade, damn I'm getting hungry! Les Baxter - African Blue (1967) [New Window]
A must have! Now available via Club Cortez blog. pop songs from thailand [New Window]
preview: " The Impossibles were the biggest of thailand's western-style pop ('string') groups throughout the "import-substitution" craze of the 1970's. this 45 rpm e.p. collects the band's songs from the 1971 (.. 2514) film of the same name, starring sombat methani, phetchara chaowarat and sangthong sisai. the songs run the gamut from smooth, harmonic ballads & wah-funk to a noisy drum-driven finale, featuring friends from the film! lots of fun to be had, in spite of the short runtime. "available via monrakplengthai" a collection of great music by thai people; (luk thung), (luk krung), (molam), various folk styles & others. most of these are taken from tapes that i found either in thailand or at home, in america." Oh By Jingo [New Window]
Remember about a week or two ago I asked for help finding this album to download? Well, fortunately a dear friend came through for me....that would be MR EBAY......and I found this in my mailbox when I came home from work tonight! The fabulously swinging tune "Oh By Jingo" is tops on my playlist this week....if you dig flawless harmonies and unrelentingly swinging combos I think you will like that hip little number from the all-round swell album Beauty Shop Beat . No Hair Sam [New Window]
The smokin' hot half of bro and sis duo April Stevens and Nino Tempo does a take-off on "Mohair Sam"! Crazy Radio Programs Cannibalize America's Culture, Even Its Youth! [New Window]
We're blowing the whistle on six hours of recorded live radio broadcasts, full of sordid and confusing sounds! Yes, more SwaG! radio shows will now infect our children! Go here to see, hear, for yourself! Baseball and Beer [New Window]
Been spending ALOT of time of late watching baseball and quaffing ale. There is something appealing about reclining in the BarcaLounger for three hours with a sixpack of suds and a bag of Frito's.Here are a few clips that capture the moment. Let's play two............ College humor [New Window]
more Voodoo Boogie [New Window]
Kraldjursanstalten's 1981 album Voodoo Boogie is positively Beefheartian, or so they say, and .El Camaleon has it. Weird Swedes, isn't that the reason we all started coming here in the first place? Nat King Cole - Autumn Leaves (in Japanese) [New Window]
Nat King Cole - Autumn Leaves (in Japanese) - 1961, Flash Video 02:41) Palito en el Beverly Hilton [New Window]
Suave Argentine pop from Palito Ortega, via Mis Discos Viejos. Palito is seen below performing with Marisol....I thought I had posted this one here already but I can't seem to find it. I'm getting old. Les Petits Boudins. [New Window]
Dominique Walter frenches it up with this Serge Gainsbourg-penned tune:[via World of Kane.] Comme un Volcan [New Window]
Rocky Volcano "Comme un Volcan" seen at ...y yo que s de eso... How Much Pine Tar is Too Much? [New Window]
Johnnyuma's baseball post from a couple days ago brings to mind this classic bit from my childhood: People Like Us + Ergo Phizmiz - "rhapsody in glue" (2008) available for free download [New Window]
Following the success of the critically acclaimed "Perpetuum Mobile" CD of 2007, renowned UK collagists / composers People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz reunite for "Rhapsody in Glue", a cycle of bricolage-ballet-music, skewed-waltzes, and skewiff-pop.There is a story behind every album, and with "Rhapsody in Glue" we find a unique approach to constructing a record. Both long-term contributors to New York radio station WFMU, People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz decided to publicly tear apart their respective practices and create an album "in the open", presenting on a seafood-filled-platter the process of collaborative collage composition - informally discussing and jabbering nonsense to one another, resulting in the "Codpaste" free podcast series. "Rhapsody in Glue" is the culmination of the ideas explored in the podcast series."Rhapsody in Glue" continues in the bizarre ballroom vein of their previous efforts together, however, increasing the sonic palette into textural depths previously uncharted in their work. If "Carmic Waltz" is an expressionist painting by aged ballroom dance teacher who's eaten the wrong kind of mushrooms in her souffl, then "Gary's Anatomy" is a slice of pure absurdist pop shot through with slabs of exotica and Ethel Merman. Recurring through the record is an apparent obsession with Prokofiev's "Troika (Sleigh Ride)", which merges and mashes with Burt Bacharach and Queen on "Snow Day", and lapses into pure fantasy on the almost entirely acoustic "Withers in the Whist", jarring with Ergo's strange, Victoriana obsessed lyrics. Then on "Dancing in the Carmen" we discover what happens if Nana Mouskouri is thrown into a pot with Peggy Lee and let simmer for 10 minutes, whilst "In The Waking" shimmers along on multitracked guitars, meandering melodies, and music boxes. (via PLU mailing list)--DOWNLOAD the album via peoplelikeus.org or via ubu.com Nyok Nyok [New Window]
That Nat King Cole song sung in Japanese (see below) is all well and good, but my prize for best phonetic rendition of a Japanese song goes to legendary 1940s disc jockey Jim Hawthorne and his rousing version of The Badger's Chorus of Shojoji Temple. (compare his version to the original) If I have piqued your curiosity about this offbeat character, you can join his Facebook page (maintained by rabid Hawthorne fan Andrea) for photos and other info. The Tide Pool of Saint-Malo [New Window]
(As a sort of marginalia to our counter Aquatics Complex, this tide pool in Saint-Malo, Brittany, France, during low tide. At the far end jutting out is the diving platform. During high tide, this Atlantic exclave rejoins the sea, as can be seen here, and the diving platform appears like a Gallic Loch Ness monster or an avian cryptid on a dawn flight, its Archaeopteryx wings skimming the surface. Photo by judo_dad1953. Source. See also the ocean pools of Sydney.) A Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid [New Window]
(Concept design by Paisajes Emergentes for the Aquatics Complex of the IX Juegos Suramericanos, Medelln, Colombia.)In the past couple of months, the IOC mafia has been inspecting the four cities vying for the rights to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Naturally, our curiosity in Chicago's candidacy heightened a bit; we even felt compelled to look through the city's updated bid book, heading straight first for what people really care about: the pretty pictures of proposed venues.Amidst the technicolor gumbo of humdrums, the aquatics complex is a noticeable thick glop. Remember when you're watching a major stadium sporting event and the camera pans for a few seconds outside, catching sights of adjacent buildings — those temporary structures wrapped in white tarpaulin, topped with awnings, used as crafts service stations and staging area? Placed as it is next to the proposed Olympic Stadium, Chicago's aquatics complex is sort of like a collection of those outhouses.Of course, this is not to say that the venue isn't going to redeem itself in other key areas. Aesthetically unimpressive it may be, it could leave a truly lasting legacy, filled in the many years to come with raucous kids and their families from the surrounding neighborhoods instead of staying empty until the rare national or international competition comes along, accumulating large maintenance bills with only the Flickr hordes frotteurising its skillfully designed skin to keep it company. Bucking the trend of the past two Olympics, it might not also morph into some ethically obscene monster, disenfranchising people left and right, funneling funds from social services and ruining the city's cultural heritage. It might even attain a LEED Quadruple Gold-Diamond Crown rating. And during the two weeks of competition, everyone's spirits are elevated higher than ever before, their soul stirred into rapture.All we're saying is that the physical elements of the proposal could be more interesting.(Counter Blur Building.)As a counter venue, then, we propose a concept aquatics complex in the middle of Lake Michigan.The superstructure, constructed on land and towed into place, will be wholly submerged, tethered to the lakebed with anchors or resting on pylons. Underwater may be an entire oil rig or Tatlin's decoiled tower, but only jutting out will be the viewing stands, the diving platforms and a few other decorative verticals. A circulation network of gangplanks, metallic or of fine timber, will just break the surface.While the main competition pools are closed containers, the practice lanes may just simply be on open water. The actual spaces of these ancillary pools are delineated by border frames. These Euclidian hydro-geometries, in turn, will be arranged so that from Google Maps, they will look like they belong in a Piet Mondrian grid painting or a Suprematist collage.Something like BIG's Copenhagen Harbour Bath, Wilk-Salina's Berlin Badeschiff and White's Kastrup Sea Bath but much further away from shore, much more sprawling and much less of that solid stuff visible.If the Water Cube and London's Aquatics Centre are pure architecture and pure engineering, this natatorium is pure landscape.In the Archives:Floating Pool(With thanks to our commenters for the public baths links.) More Spatial High Jinks 1: Tactical Horticulture [New Window]
(Growing anti-terrorist shrubs and trees in the sun-dappled landscape of eastern France. Photo courtesy of The Daniel Soupe Group. Source.)Discovered via the breathless Bryan Finoki of Subtopia and his epic feral version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is Sinnoveg, a France-based tree nursery and horticulture research center specializing in securitizing sites, goods and persons by a concept of anti-intrusion security integrated into the environment. As described, this natural concept is based on planting of a hedge of thorny plants, weaved into each other and into metallic elements of reinforcement. According to Agence France-Presse, the company has planted vegetation barriers around a nuclear research centre outside Paris, a juvenile detention centre, train stations and airports. And now, they want to take their patented shrubs to Baghdad's Green Zone and replacing its vast network of concrete blast walls with terrorist-proof trees and bushes.To make the vege-walls more secure, traditional barbed wire, tyre spikes, sensors and even metal barriers can be placed within the hedges - an invisible back-up layer of security sure to surprise any potential suicide bomber.(This is the first in a series of five time-saver nanoposts on somewhat related items. Other spatial high jinks.) Kerb 17 [New Window]
(Coming soon to terrorize the status quo?)Mitchell Whitelaw, of The Teeming Void, alerted us that Kerb 17 is now available or at least will be soon. Last Friday was its launch party. We checked Amazon, and it doesn't seem to be listed, though copies of two previous editions are still available for purchase: Kerb 15 - Landscape Urbanism and Kerb 16 - Future Cities.Compiled and edited each year by landscape architecture students at RMIT, the latest issue tackles the question, Is landscape architecture dead?kerb 17 critiques current modes of thinking about the practice of landscape architecture, offering up a discussion of where landscape architecture is, what it has evolved from, and what it might become in the future. The collection of works and ideas by international and Australian designers and artists featured in kerb 17 respond and demonstrate how through the medium of landscape and a potential mediation of design disciplines we can reconsider contemporary ideas of landscape.Except for Whitelaw's article, the content remains a mystery to us. We can thus only speculate what's on offer inside from the riotously wacky cover.Are we to expect a repudiation of hyper-modern designery and a celebration of the informal?Is there a call away from the Dutch School of slick sustainability and cosmetic urban regeneration towards the messier logistics of radical sustainability?Is someone making the case for post-nature as a legitimate site not just of landscape inquiry but of landscape design?Rural nostalgia run amok?Meanwhile, we wait. Pole Farm [New Window]
(Get out your 3D glasses for this anaglyph image of a telephone pole farm. See also this panorama. Both images by Jay Yarm.)Another testing grounds is this field of telephone poles located in Chester Township, New Jersey. It's an arboretum of sorts, planted with several hundred trunks, the total of which may have peaked close to a thousand, carved out of different tree species and preserved using various methods. All are arranged in a formal grid and tagged with data-rich metal plates.Here, AT&T and then other telecommunication companies subjected their lifeless midget forest to the elements and time. A menagerie of woodpeckers and pocket gophers were brought in to attack the poles. Humans and their spiked boots, too, ran rampant about the place in a balletic dance of ascents and descents, empirically choreographed. Once a research center partly turned into a weird kind of aviary or a petting zoo or an even weirder sort of artificial ecology, the site is now part of a recreational area and an archive of our infrastructural past.(Thanks, Chris F., for the tip.) Ghost Houses [New Window]
(From our repository of decorative whatnots and filler knickknackeries, this photogenic ghostly imprint of aborted architecture. Some refer to them as medianeras, others as the unconscious art of demolition. Our own fancy phraseology is urban graffiti of absence. The photograph above by Marcus Buck comes from his photo series called Restarchitektur, viewable via Freie Arbeiten on his flash website. With thanks to the artist for the photo.) More Spatial High Jinks 3: The Forests of Isratine and Palesrael [New Window]
(Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, The Saints Forest, 2005.)(Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Canada Park, 2005.)Around Jerusalem, write Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in Chicago, acres of pine forest are used as popular family picnic spots. On the weekends they fill up with cars, people, pets, barbecues. But in the early mornings, just after dawn, the forests are completely silent, serene and untainted, giving the impression of timeless landscapes in which trees have been standing forever.But this apparent natural wilderness is a carefully constructed scene, as many of these forests have been systematically planted on the expropriated land of Arab villages, which were forcibly evacuated and deliberately destroyed in 1948. It was not only sandy desert that was forested, but also cultivated olive groves and rural villages, the underlying intention being to obscure the locations of these villages so as to prevent any further cultivaton or re-settlement of the land by non-Jews.These are places of erasure and amnesia.(This is the third in a series of five time-saver nanoposts of somewhat related items.) Flemish Island Constellation [New Window]
(Vlaamse Baaien 2100, a project by Office of Permanent Modernity in collaboration with the engineers Arcadis, AT&M, IMDC, and the dredging companies DEME and Jan de Nul. Image by Office of Permanent Modernity.)On the coast, in a landscape of instabilities and ambiguities, there are surprisingly three things that are constant: 1) sea level is rising; 2) people living along the coast — a huge percentage of the global population, a number that's steadily rising — will not budge, even if hurricanes after hurricanes after hurricanes keep pummeling their cities of ramshackled hovels — rather than retreating, they will dig themselves deeper and deeper; 3) they will entrench themselves by basically building walls.One of these future walls may be the Flemish Island Constellation, a proposal by the Office of Permanent Modernity for a chain of artificial islands shielding the entire Belgian coast.(Image by Office of Permanent Modernity.)Unlike a similar project further up north, the Tulip Island in the Netherlands, and even the Palms of Dubai, this archipelago will be based on morphological logic. Instead of plopping down arbitrary geometries, the islands will be built up from existing banks in the North Sea, using the current morphology to determine their placement. Instead of isolating themselves, they will be opened up to the dynamic flows of the landscape. They will be North Sea-specific.Once divined out of the sea, these extended coastlines will host natural reserves and sanctuaries for migrating wildlife, windmills and dune villages.(Image by Office of Permanent Modernity.)(Image by Office of Permanent Modernity.)(Image by Office of Permanent Modernity.)Meanwhile, we are of the persuasion that managed retreat is the best of possible solutions to coastal erosion and future inundation by sea level rise. What possible benefits local businesses and the heritage preservation police get from fortifying themselves in concrete are offset by the massive infrastructural cost needed, a multi-decade investment now even more unsustainable in the current financial crisis. And if past projects are anything to go by, what gets built will create more problems than it's supposed to solve.But we're thinking of the eastern seaboard and the gulf coast of the United States. We don't know much about the coastal geology of Belgium. Sea level rise by climate change may be global, but hyperlocally, it will manifest itself in ways as myriad as the varying geomorphological conditions at every stretch of every coastlines. So maybe this artificial archipelago will work. It's already been conceptualized as anti-Dubai, so it rests on a good footing.In the Archives:On the coast More Spatial High Jinks 2: How to Build a Park in Jerusalem [New Window]
(Photo by Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times.)Last week, we read in The New York Times that Israel is quietly carrying out a $100 million, multiyear development plan in some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City here as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital.As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views, along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history.To be intentionally obvious and understated, the plan is controversial.(This is the second in a series of five time-saver nanoposts of somewhat related items.) Arrangement of Test Specimens at Treat Island Natural Weathering Exposure Station [New Window]
(Image courtesy Army Corps of Engineers.)Registering once more, if not for the first time, our fascination with so-called, or rather so-tagged, testing grounds, an interest which we weren't acutely aware of having until we started labeling our posts only a couple months ago and realized that we have actually posted many examples of this type of landscape, these sites of experimentation, simulations, and novel theories and forms of landscape and architecture: this rack map of concrete slabs at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' materials testing facility at Treat Island, Maine.There, these test specimens are exposed to natural severe environmental conditions to test for durability. They are subjected to between 100 and 160 freeze-thaw cycles, cyclic inundation of saltwater and air-drying, chloride intrusion, wetting and drying, and abrasion-erosion.There and in many other testing grounds, arranged in museological, Donald Judd-like intervals of solids and negatives, these perfect geometries are coming undone. The building blocks of future cities and monuments fracture and decay in a way that belies their solidity and intended permanence. Bit by bit, atom by atom, structures get nullified and give way. Year 5 [New Window]
(Very briefly, Pruned turns 4 today. Or to inflate that number a bit, we are starting Year 5 today! Here's to 4 more years! Oh, no. The image above, meanwhile, comes from UK-based Earth Images, which sells fine art prints of these sonorous lithic Turners — cue Ligeti — and of other pictorial stones but unfortunately not the polished rocks themselves.) [New Window]
Atlas Obscura is a growing compendium of out-of-the-way places that are singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange from Dylan Thuras, of Curious Expedition, and Joshua Foer, of the long-dormant Athanasius Kircher Society. Marvelous! The Wetland Machine of Sidwell [New Window]
(The wetland machine of Sidwell Friends School by Andropogon Associates, Kieran Timberlake Associates and Natural Systems International. Image by Andropogon Associates.)Reading an ASLA interview of Jose Alminana, a principal at Andropogon Associates, we were reminded that Sidwell Friends School, the Quaker school of choice for the Obamas, the Clintons, the Gores, the Bidens, the Nixons — practically every member of Washington's politocracy, except for the Carters, of course — has in the courtyard of a recently renovated building an artificial wetland.Not merely an eco-ornament, it's a machine that manages all the wastewater generated by the building, as well as all the rain water that falls on the site.(View from top of the wetland terrace towards the new building extension. Photo by Andropogon Associates.)Typically, wastewater is drained away via a complex network of tunnels that requires vast financial resources just for its maintenance, an infrastructure that's undoubtedly deteriorating just as fast as tax revenues get siphoned off away from public works budgets to General Motors and Bank of America. Miles and miles away from its point of origin, the water then gets treated in an energy intensive process. But it still isn't entirely clean afterwards. Thus, when discharged, it still poses a risk to bodies of water, contributing in many instances to elevated bacterial count and eutrophication.At Sidwell, wastewater is treated on-site, somewhat off-the-grid and using comparatively minimal infrastructure. The treatment cycle begins inside the building in a tank filled with anaerobic bacteria. Among other things, these bacteria help break down solids. The effluent is then pumped outside to a trickle filter before continuing on by gravity to a series of tiered wetlands. To lessen the health risk of contact with students and to mitigate any odor problems, water flows through beneath layers of pea gravel; there's no surface flow, in other words. This planting medium contains phytoremediating plants which, together with the microorganisms attached to their root hairs and to the gravel stones, extract contaminants from the water. After slowly trickling its way outside for about a couple of days or so, the water then re-enters the building and gets collected in storage tank ready for reuse in flushing toilets, among other uses for greywater.(Site plan: 1. Existing Middle School; 2. Middle School addition with green roof; 3. Trickle filter with interpretive display; 4. Wetlands for wastewater treatment; 5. Rain garden; 6. Pond; 7. Outdoor classroom; 8. Butterfly meadow; 9. Woodland screen at neighborhood edge; 10. Playground. Image by Andropogon Associates.)Just as with wastewater, managing urban stormwater typically involves massive infrastructure to dispose runoffs as efficiently and as quickly as possible. In addition to being a drain on municipal coffers, such a method is known to increase the probability and the intensity of a flood event during major storms, endangering human life and property. Moreover, since stormwater isn't allowed to remain where it falls, (1) water doesn't have enough time to infiltrate the soil and seep into waiting, possibly depleted groundwater aquifers, and (2) what may have been clean at first contact with the surface undoubtedly will not remain so as it moves through sidewalks, roads, parking lots and sewers before going on to pollute rivers, lakes and other sources of our drinking water.(Two students on the border between the rain garden and the pond. Photo by Andropogon Associates.)At Sidwell, we get a hint of an alternative system for stormwater management: hyperlocal, lo-fi, modular (i.e., implementations at multiple sites would be needed to bring about an appreciable effect on urban hydrology), soft and comparatively cheap.(Section cut through the 1. tiered wetlands used for wastewater treatment; 2. rain garden; and 3. pond. Image by Andropogon Associates.)Runoff is directed to a rain garden and a permanent biology pond located downslope from the tiered wetlands used for wastewater treatment.(Flow diagram of stormwater runoff. Image by Andropogon Associates.)Some of the runoff gets in an underground cistern. During dry weather, this storage tank provides water to the pond. During heavy rains, excess water flows from the pond into the rain garden, simulating the hydrological dynamics of a floodplain environment. Water seeps through the soil and gets naturally filtered. (Flow diagram of stormwater runoff from pond to rain garden. Image by Andropogon Associates.)Andropogon describes this project as a working landscape but we might prefer calling it an event landscape, wherein natural processes are co-opted into a cybernetic amalgam of landscape, architecture, geology, biology and institutional pedagogy. Rather than in the inaccessible subterranean voids and in scientific abstractions, this eco-machine is made to perform out in the open for the edification of the elite who, in their dirty, smelly, real-world engagement with the landscape, will hopefully turn into great stewards of the earth.In the Archives:On constructed wetlands Bloggers with a Twin Conjoined at the Belly, Standing in the Landscape [New Window]
(Or A naked man with a twin conjoined at the belly, standing in the landscape, from Giovanni Battista de' Cavalieri's Monsters from all parts of the ancient and modern world, 1585. Source.)Because sometimes we think bloggers, particularly those on the built environment, are a monstrous sub-breed of humanity: preening, humorless, fringe feeding, attention whoring polemicist and apologists who take too many things too seriously too many times.But these ones aren't.arch-peace news and articles: blog of Architects for Peace.By Design: by Allison Arieff.High Line Blog: if you're one of the most famous post-2000 designed landscapes, you gotta have a blog.Hungry City, the blog: by Carolyn Steel, author of Hungry City, the book.People and Place: a tumbleblog by @a_me1, we think.rory hyde dot com blog: via @roryhyde.Society of Fellows of the American Academy in Rome Weblog: so far just a smattering of posts that interest us, but the few that do, such as those on Alan Berger and the academy's Rome Sustainable Food Project, make subscribing to its feed worthwhile. And then there are the photos of boozy jamborees of the Veuve clique and the culturati and arrivistes greasing Last-Tango-in-Paris-like around the canap trays.Sustainable Stormwater Management: they must be after our hearts.Veg.itecture: an off-shoot of Landscape+Urbanism.Water in the Sustainable Environment: blog of Natural Systems International, specialists in alternative wastewater/stormwater management, and part of the design team of the Sidwell Friends Middle School project.For our public blogroll, see our list of RSS feeds on Bloglines. Which of these you are going to subscribe to (or whether or not you are going to follow even one of them) will be up to you. Exit Oil [New Window]
(Not part of the exhibition mentioned below but otherwise related: a photo of the eternal flames of Ebocha, Nigeria. Photo by Michael Kamber. Source. Previously.)Exit Art is a little gallery in New York that's been putting together some incredibly fascinating exhibitions. Like Storefront for Art and Architecture, it always seems to be beckoning us with thematically enticing programs.A recent exhibition, for example, tackled the controversial field of bioart. We featured several projects from this show, called Corpus Extremus (LIFE+), including Richard Pell's Center for PostNatural History.Another recent installation featured vertical farms, urban gardens and green roofs. If you follow much this trendy landscape genre, no doubt you've seen most, if not all, of the projects, but sometimes it's nice to see what previously has been just a disparate and rather messy jumble of bookmarks littering your hard drive now collected into one, easily surveyed room.Even some of the ancillary events sound interesting, such as a lecture once given by Oleg Mavromatti, the co-founder of the art collective ULTRAFUTURO. His talk was on Russian Cosmism, which was a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how this mystical philosophy affected the development of Soviet science and space research.A quick wiki-research on Russian Cosmism brought up Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, a representative of the movement and who was an advocate of radical life extension by means of scientific methods, human immortality and resurrection of dead people, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who we read believed that colonizing space would lead to the perfection of the human race, with immortality and a carefree existence.One wonders if the early development of space exploration in America and by extension the nation's popular imaginings of the landscapes of other worlds have similarly interesting antecedents, or does everything trace back to a bunch of Nazi rocket scientists and not to some deep philosophical inquiry into the human condition?In any case, opening today at Exit Art is The End of Oil, an exhibition of photography, prints, videos, installations and new media that addresses human dependence on oil and other fossil fuels; the ramifications that this dependency has on the future of the environment and of global geopolitics; and the recent push towards viable alternative energy resources.The works in this exhibition draw attention to and investigate the violent conflicts (such as in Nigeria, Burma and Sudan) and negative environmental effects that result from mining and drilling; the politicization of the oil industry; carbon-footprinting; and renewable energy options, such as vegetable and electric-powered cars, geothermal energy, and solar power. The End of Oil does not prophesize a dystopian future, but looks critically at the way in which we use and generate energy, encouraging a dialogue on this issue for the benefit of future generations.This exhibition is a project of SEA (Social-Environmental Aesthetics).SEA is a unique endeavor that presents a diverse multimedia exhibition program and permanent archive of artworks that address social and environmental concerns. SEA will assemble artists, activists, scientists and scholars to address environmental issues through presentations of visual art, performances, panels and lecture series that will communicate international activities concerning environmental and social activism.So many good things piled up on top of one another.If you're in town, consider stopping by. Some Freshly Fallen Hills [New Window]
(You can be forgiven for mistaking this to be a photo — bigger version — of an art installation in a beautiful new pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale — something to do with the human and environmental cost of mineral resource extraction, perhaps. Or for thinking that Leah Beeferman is finally going through the step-by-step process of building a landscape of freshly fallen hills into an industrious winged city. Or Geoff Manaugh terraforming habitable artificial hills for future intergalactic archaeologists. But this building is actually a in . Photographer unknown. Source.) Va Va Va Boom!! [New Window]
I continue to have a fascination with firecracker wrappers. As a kid, I used to be reluctant to open the packages for fear of wrecking the exotic art that was affixed to the pack. I imagined this saved me a few fingers as well..... in any case, Exposur3's Flickr Page is chock full of these goodies. More Spatial High Jinks 4: Arbor-veillance [New Window]
(Image by Rebecca Macri.)Proposal #1: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power a maintenance-free, mesh-networked sensing system to predict and detect forest wildfires.(Image by Rebecca Macri.)Proposal #2: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power a remote arboreal border homeland security system.Proposal #3: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power an apparatus which acclimatizes a parcel from its present northern climes to conditions last seen when the area was straddling the equator, thus enabling the survival of formerly native tropical flora and fauna.Proposal #4: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power concealed speakers sculpting the extinct sonic landscapes of a former ecosystem.Proposal #5: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power mobile telecommunication devices long enough for passing hikers, park rangers and loggers to send a couple of tweets.Proposal #6: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power fog machines which can be used, depending on your artistic persuasion, to render non-classically the very much classical scene of an aerosolized Jupiter raping Io, or equally classical scenes of wars and heroes, for instance, napalm defoliation during the Vietnam War.In the Archives:Agro-veillance(This is the fourth in a series of five time-saver nanoposts of somewhat related items.) A Zoo in Vienna [New Window]
(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)Schnbrunn Zoo in Vienna is host to a fascinating series of temporary art installations by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf. In one animal enclosure, the German duo have half-submerged a car in a watering hole used by the resident rhinos. In another enclosure, penguins frolic in the shadow of an oil pump, and in yet another, alligators must share their modest bayou with a bathtub and a monster truck tire.According to the artists, these scenes of ecological nightmares are experimental set-up[s] in which the viewer is forced to reconsider traditional modes of animal presentation and simultaneously to question the authenticity of concepts which are restaging 'natural' environments while they are increasingly endangered.(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)Quoting further: Present-day conceptions of zoological gardens aim at the presentation of animals in an idyllic and apparently natural environment, untouched by civilization. But this is a contemporary conception, since courtly menageries and kennels were adapted to the exposure of animals as decorative objects. Until the early years of the 20th century, animals were part of a preferably spectacular and exotic staging, to the entertainment and amazement of the public. The artificial and the sensational were foregrounded, without creating a realistic setting of the natural environment of the animals.(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)The installations will last until October 18, 2009.Related:Other Simulated Worlds We Irish Handball Alleys [New Window]
Some photos of Irish handball alleys taken from a research blog devoted to cataloguing them and studying their histories. They're not something we were specifically searching for. In fact, we can't now remember how we came upon them, but we're glad we did. Somehow, in all that time-devouring sonic cloud of nighttime mouse clicks, we managed to discover something marvelous.Make Use, the research group coordinating the project, writes:The handball alley was built wherever a site was available, on parish or donated private lands, institutional lands, and often attached to lime kilns and religious ruins. The later 60x30 feet alley tended to be free standing and typically unroofed. Referred to as the big alley, this form seems to be indigenous to Ireland and continued to be built until the introduction of the international 40x20 feet standard in 1969.These alleys now dot the landscape. In the countryside, freestanding alleys appear like the remnants of houses and buildings abandoned by emigrants to the New World and subsequently truncated wall by wall in the years and decades ahead by those left behind: a Brutalist void-sculpture commemorating the lost generation and a nostalgic reminder of a mythic happier time before the diaspora. In cases where they are attached to buildings, they look like the remains of a former church, specifically its jutting buttressed walls, a victim of Henry VIII's Catholic pogroms, now ivy covered. Or they look like blast protection walls of an abandoned military base, a magnet for explorers of post-industrial landscapes. Or a fake ruin in a folly garden. Of course, many are actually true ruins, overgrown with shrubbery, disintegrating and inundated by the earth.Things only get more interesting in urban areas where many of the alleys seem to have been absorbed, or accidentally adaptively reused, as the city grew around them. That side of that building or that wall or that parking lot or that space sculpted by three buildings in the back — all are actually the artifacts of codified game-spaces. Strikingly devoid of decoration, these alleys now adorn faades as archaeological ornaments.(Photograph by R. Ryan.)(Photographer unknown.)(Photograph by E. Timmoney.)(Photograph by Neil McDermot.)(Photographer unknown.)(Photograph by Neil McDermott.)Related:Grain Elevators Sonic Garden [New Window]
(Doug Moffat and Steve Bates, Soundfield, 2007, 2008, 2009. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens.)Another installation at this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens is Soundfield by Doug Moffat and Steve Bates.According to the brief, this avant-garden is an intervention that frames and presents this experience by creating an electronic sound field amidst the poplar trees building on it, transforming it, and ultimately creating a woven fabric of sound.As visitors wander through the site they will become aware of slowly shifting and changing sounds that are familiar but not clearly identifiable the buzz of insects, perhaps, or white noise from a radio. Five sensors capture changes in wind speed and direction that are then translated into subtle changes in the sounds broadcast through a grid of small speakers and amplifiers that are distributed throughout the site. A conversation develops as the trees whisper back and the electronic sound field changes in response.But consider, meanwhile, Alex Metcalf's Tree Listening Installation, in which you listen in to the quiet popping sound that is produced by the water passing through the cells of the Xylem tubes and cavitating as it mixes with air on its way upwards. In the background is a deep rumbling sound that is produced by the tree moving vibrating.(Alex Metcalf, Tree Listening Installation, 2008. Photo by Richard Braine.)Consider, as well, Markus Kison's touched echo, a site specific sound installation attached to iron railings on a hill overlooking the city of Dresden. There, the public can hear the recreated aural landscape of Dresden during a nighttime bombing raid in 1945. But to listen in to the sounds of airplanes droning and of sirens wailing and of bombs whistling as they fall to earth and then exploding, you have rest your elbows on the iron railings and cup your hands over ears.As explained by the artist, the sound is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through the arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction) and cannot be heard by anyone else. Visitors suddenly get an idea of what it must have felt like that night; they travel back in time to this situation. Everyone by dealing with this terrifying event becomes a kind of 'memorial' of it. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions.(Markus Kison, touched echo, 2008. Photo by the artist.)Combining these two other installations, perhaps one could imagine a re-working of the first so that rather than the recording and listening devices scattered about the place, they are implanted into the trees. And instead of sitting on a bench or just standing there having reconstituted ambient noises blasted at you, there is a more direct, physical engagement: you cup your hands and let elbow and bark touch. Or you press your ear against the trunks of those trees to hear the soundtrack.And yes, you can even hug them, letting the vibrations course through your body — reverberating through your bones and echoing through the chambers of your lungs until they hit an ear drum, much changed and re-sampled by your own body. It's a Forestry and Anatomy mashup.To hear the sunless interiors of their roots, you'll have to lie flat on your stomach and press your ear against dirt.And who knows, perhaps the sound emanating from the earth and then filtered through a certain body type may sound incredibly like the otherworldly harmonics of Jupiter.(With thanks to Geoff Manaugh, specifically for this.) Re: Instants de bonheur ... [New Window]
posted by boronali using PHREADZ Spciale ddicace ... [New Window]
breaking news : Autoprocopinagement ... ( la mode "Oh ! Ah ! Qu'il est b !") [New Window]
J'avais compltement oubli qu'il tait en ligne celui-l, chez Lo Scheer (merci eux de ne pas m'avoir tenu au courant de la mise ne ligne ! ! Belle surprise !)Si vous voulez lire de la prose qui va rvolutionner la littrature de fonds en comble, cliquez sur l'image ... La fin du tunnel ... [New Window]
Aprs une descente vertigineuse et inexorable depuis juillet 2007, la frquenquation de ce blog a progress de + 12,54% sur le dernier trimestre ... Tous les espoirs sont donc - raisonnablement - permis quant une reprise rapide de la croissance des commentaires ... (hm ... hm ...)Bon sinon, moins srieusement, Attali refait le pitre en pleine confrence :(merci JMM pour cette bonne tranche de rire !) Je vous aime, bande de nazes ! [New Window]
Cher(e) Franais(e)s,Ce dimanche, vous avez vot "colo" ... (je ne saurais, ici, cit l'ensemble des listes infdoes l'co-tartuffe nomm "Cohn-Bendit" ...)Sachez, qu'en fait, vous avez vot UMP. C'est drle, non ?Oui, votre acte simili-contestataire, que vous soyez rgulirement encart chez les "verts" ou que vous ayez rpondu une impulsion "rvolutionnaire", vous avez vot pour un institution politique ractionnaire .. L rside toute l'ironie de la "chose publique".Convaincu(e) ou non, 48 heures avant le scrutin, grand renfort mdiatique, vous avez gob le sublime documentaire de Yann Arthus-Bertrand (grand ordonnateur de l'Eco-tartufferie), sponsoris par son ami Luc Besson ( Proslyte mrite de l'Eco-tartufferie promptement infod l'UMP). La vision de ce pangyrique de la protection de Mre Nature l'intention exclusive de ceux qui vont s'y amuser par hlicoptre interpos, vous a pris aux tripes, au point de vous motiver procder - in petto, soit en parfaite vibration avec votre fibre "bobo", voter Vert, toute voile dehors.Histoire de couler la gauche atone de sainte mre Aubry et l'alternative politique du centre du dsormais clbre bras cass mdiatique Bayrou.Chapeau bas !En un parfait jargon politique, cela s'appelle :"Se faire enculer en fournissant la poigne de gravier !"En totale misricorde, je vous aime pour cet acte d'une parfaite inconsquence ! La ppite du dimanche (une fois de plus le lundi ... euh non le mardi ! [New Window]
Merci Phase3 pour la dcouverte ! La ppite du dimanche l'attention de 6 000 000 000 d'erreurs. [New Window]
La crise venir. L'effondrement montaire. La grippe mexicaine. Les lections europennes. La violence dans les banlieues. Le dnouement de la Nouvelle Star. Les kilos perdre avant l't. Le rchauffement climatique. Le crdit immobilier. Le nivellement par le bas. La rgression de la publicit sur Internet. La procrastination, mal du sicle. L'ducation des enfants. La malbouffe. les pesticides. Le crash du AF447. Le relativisme prjudiciable. La fin des religions. Les taux de la BCE. Le tltravail. Le manque de spiritualit. 2012. La fin des temps. Le prservatif. Les Martiens. La destruction de la biomasse. Le Prozac. Les nouvelles destinations prix cass. Les zones commerciales. Le plomb dans les peintures murales. Le dsamour. L'veil de la Chine. La presse papier contre les blogueurs. L'homophobie. L'alcoolisme au volant. Les sites de rencontre. La dsagrgation pri-urbaine. La collection automne-hiver. Le sel dans les artres. Le dveloppement durable. Le concert des nations. Le nouveau Prsident des USA. Le dernier album de Bnabar. Le chmage. Le bac sable ...Rewind :Tu es un homme ? Sois un homme.Tu es une femme ? Sois une femme.Tu es humain ? Alors sois. Synchronicit (bis) [New Window]
(C) Li WeDimanche dans la nuit, je compltais mon rite de passage vers une nouvelle humanit.Lundi matin, je trouvais un scarabe dor.(sans commentaires) Instantans de grce (encore du rchauff ! ! !) [New Window]
(c) Tom Conrad"On rattrape forcment un jour toutes les nuits perdues."Elle m'acheva par cette ineptie de haute vole. Elle tait l, poseuse sans gard et sans grce m'appesantir de guimauves indigestes sur le prince charmant entrecoupes de louches de fiel sur les hommes menteurs et fuyants qu'il faudrait castrer "forcment". Elle me sortait toute la panoplie de la dresseuse de toutous la sauce Marie-Claire rchauffe Psychologies Magazine.La reprsentation thtrale touchait sa fin et j'avais dj soup. Elle pouvait bien continuer me susurrer entre les lignes "prends moi comme une chienne", je ne l'entendais plus. Je ne lui offrais qu'un facis comprhensif du plus haut de mon ddain. Hypocrite et assum. Je l'avais trouv "pleine de charme", elle s'tait enlaidie au fur et mesure du dballage de son catalogue de prtendante au bonheur conjugal.Je regardais depuis longtemps au-del de sa ligne Maginot vaginal (celle qui se prend revers, la prussienne, avec aisance et panache.). Je regardais cette femme, l.Cette femme. Celle-l. Qui me faisait renifler chaque oeillade le fumet du sexe prpar avec amour et dextrit quand l'autre poire me parlait de micro-onde. Cette femme qui m'offrait du cashmere et de la broderie en change des kilomtres d'imprims polyester des autres. Celles qui n'ont mme pas droit un prnom.Sans arme et sans coup frir, cette femme renvoya "machine" au rang anonyme des "rches du con". Je l'en remerciai silencieusement, religieusement.Pnitent, j'entrai avec joie dans l'abngation que rclamait sa vnration. Je me levai, m'avanai vers elle :- mademoiselle, parlez moi - s'il vous plat - de votre vie sans moi.- Que dire monsieur, si ce n'est qu'elle s'est acheve ce soir.Le "merci" peint sur mes lvres vint dteindre sur les siennes.Beach House "Used To Be"Dedicated to both of you, Sister & Brother ... La ppite du dimanche ... [New Window]
N'en dplaise au Suisse de la blogosphre, je vous recolle une vido :Post sponsoris par :(le meilleur site pour faire des grimaces sa webcam ...) le mot du jour : Equanimit. [New Window]
7 Renk 1W 12 LED Ampul (Normal Duy) 4.90 TL + 3.00 TL Kargo (KDV Dahil) Sfra yakn tketimEdisonun Pabucunu Dama Atan rn! (encul de spammeur turc ! ! ! ) L'quanimit, l'galit d'me, d'humeur, est une disposition affective de dtachement et de srnit l'gard de toute sensation ou vocation, agrable ou dsagrable.En tant que rsultat d'une pratique spirituelle, ou d'un cheminement de croissance personnelle, ce dtachement s'enracine et se stabilise par une acceptation de soi-mme et de ses circonstances, passes ou actuelles, un lcher-prise constant malgr les caprices de sa volont et de sa ractivit personnelles, ainsi qu'une base de confiance dans le bien-fond des donnes de la vie, par une intuition grandissante de leur nature relle. Ces processus trs variables auront fini par laborer un apaisement intime de l'esprit devant tout dsir, peur, etc.Dans le bouddhisme, ce terme traduit le sanskrit upek (upekkha en pli). L'quanimit est un des Quatre Incommensurables que dveloppe la bodhicitta. Dans ce contexte on l'entend comme impartialit, l'intention de bienveillance tant gale envers un proche comme envers un inconnu ou mme quelqu'un de malveillant notre gard.Dcouvrez Philippe Lotard! L're de rien ... [New Window]
(photo honteusement pique sur le net - merci mamzelle-que-je-ne-connais-pas - histoire de grossirement attirer le chaland ...)La connexion se fait par les pieds, plants dans l'herbe mouille. La sensation de la terre remonte rapidement vers la tte, comme un relchement intgral. Bientt, il faut s'accroupir pour poser les deux mains au sol et restituer le flux d'nergie.Me voil comme une grenouille communiant avec une femelle merle qui passe, le ver au bec.Le trfle est en fleur. Cet aprs-midi, il sera tondu.Je n'ai rien d'autre faire. Et je m'en rjouis.Susheela Raman - "What Silence Said" - Music for Crocodiles. Last day dream [New Window]
Last Day Dream [HD] from Chris Milk on Vimeo. "Dieu est assis tous les soirs devant Ruquier !" ( ou La Ppite du Dimanche) [New Window]
(via) Picture of the Walls (merci mamzelle K. !) Mbius Music Box ... [New Window]
Ce qu'il y a de bien avec le ruban de Mbius, c'est qu'on peut en faire n'importe quoi, mme de la musique : Via MoonMilk.com In Memoriam [New Window]
"Quand Brassens est mort, j'ai pas honte de le dire 40 ans passs, j'ai pleur comme un mme alors que quand Tino Rossi est mort, j'ai repris deux fois des moules". Pierre Desproges(Dfinitivement "too bad", Mickael Jackson ...) En roue libre ... [New Window]
Question everything. Peacefully.(*) @import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css); Bruce Springsteen - The Ghost Of Tom Joad Found at skreemr.com(*) A commencer par la plus simple : "Qui suis-je ?" ... A vous les studios ! Tonton Boro a aussi donn dans la mdecine ... [New Window]
Fut un temps (que les utilisateurs de Twitter ne peuvent pas connatre ...) o j'osais commettre des blogs-canular dont la dure de vie n'excdait que rarement la dure d'une bonne plaisanterie ...Il en reste quelques trs rares en ligne (du Blog Collector quoi !). Un vil exemple combien estival avec :I stepped on a used condom ...... While sometimes a single twisted move forward upon a worn out and abandoned plastic item dedicated to safe sexual intercourse can be a Giant Leap for self-acceptance and successful social integration ..."This is not a job, it is endeavour !" Hi ! My name is Thelomious Hermann Poolittle, PhD in "Is it a bird in my head ?" sciences. After a profitable participation to Spring Break 1987 in Fort "Louder Dave !", I decided to devote myself to mental diseases related to consumerist misbehaviors. I did identify the PSCA Trauma "Post-Shopping Cart Accident Trauma" and became a worldwide specialist. My well-known book "Emprisonned into a Wallmart Cart" (Woolworth Press) is still on the Top 10 book selling list. But my life and certitudes got dramatically unbalanced this day of April 2001 when I received in my office Priscilla Oilovermy-Peabody. This nice housewife was suffering from - what I will later call the ISOnAUC Trauma ("I STEPPED On A USED CONDOM" Trauma). Because, two days after our meeting I had to undergo the same traumatic situation, i decided to organise rounds of Group therapy on this increasing daily trouble ! And this site is meant to be an extension of our work during the last 3 years ! So please, if you too one day have stepped on a used condom, do not keep it for yourself ! Do not dig it deeper and deeper into your unconsciousness or you may turn into a lethal sociopath starting chopping apart your neighbors ! Come and join us ! And all together we will bravely overcome this personal trauma ! Helpfully yours, Doc Poolittle Le reste est par l ... AJ Fosik - An Introduction [New Window]
AJ Fosik Artist Profile from Kwality Media on Vimeo....
Fri, 3 Jul 2009 03:15:54 -0500 AJ Fosik - An Introduction [New Window]
AJ Fosik Artist Profile from Kwality Media on Vimeo.
Fri, 3 Jul 2009 03:14:59 -0500 ?THE CATERER? by Jeff Lint [New Window]
“Dreams always end before you kill the last person.”
Fri, 3 Jul 2009 02:43:04 -0500 Jason Kanakis and his Coalition of the Unwilling [New Window]
indie folk // singer-songwriter A talented multi-instrumentalist, Jason Kanakis has been making a name for himself as a sideman for Aurgasm alum Cary Brothers, as well as Joshua Radin, Sara Bareilles, Rachael Yamagata and many others. While he has always been a writer and singer, Jasons upcoming release is the first that is uniquely [...]
Fri, 3 Jul 2009 01:39:00 -0500 Today?s Autonomedia Jubilee Saint ? GIL WOLMAN [New Window]
July 3– Gil WolmanProminent French Lettrist and Situationist theorist.Read A User’s Guide to Detournement by Wolman and Debord on Bureau of Public Secrets.JULY 3, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS*Montana: Annual Sun Dance of the Assiniboine tribe.*Festival of WildernessALSO ON JULY 3 IN HISTORY…1832 Opium exempted from US federal tariff duty.1883 Modern allegorist writer [...]
Fri, 3 Jul 2009 00:15:23 -0500 Poule mouille! [New Window]
(Claudia Delisle, Karine Dieujuste, Philippe Nolet and Sami Tannoury, Poule mouille!, 2008, 2009. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens.)And still yet another installation at this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens: with the caveat that we haven't yet seen any of the gardens in person — to repeat: not a single one — and thus we're only judging by image and text alone, our handicapped favorite is the entry by the team of Claudia Delisle, Karine Dieujuste, Philippe Nolet and Sami Tannoury.This garden, they write, takes its form from the most common garden tools: 66 sprinklers that remind us of the residential garden. This installation takes roots in the collective memory, reminding us of spontaneous childhood water games.Watery naves fleeting in and out of form. Infectiously joyous children and adults shooting through the spritely, melodically sputtering fountains, shrieking as if experiencing a kind of hydrological rapture — that is, until keeling over, comatosed from too much nostalgia of domestic bliss.This installation is called Poule mouille!, which can be loosely translated as: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!In the Archives:The Hydrological Playground Par-veillance [New Window]
(Illustration by Graham Roberts and Bedel Saget for The New York Times.)In trying to absolve themselves of their litany of environmental sins, some golf courses have started using treated effluent water to maintain their unnatural lushness.According to The New York Times, Golf courses are all but weaned from municipal fresh-water systems, with 86 percent now using some other source, liked recycled effluent water, surface water or water treated by reverse osmosis. Significantly, 70 percent of superintendents surveyed said they were keeping their turf drier.Additionally, those that can afford it have been experimenting with subterranean wireless sensors to better manage and monitor their water use. In terms of water conservation, they're turning out to be quite a success. One club superintendent is quoted as saying that they have cut the amount of water they use in half.The implication here, of course, is that giving high-tech intelligence to other landscapes — to athletic fields, farms, parks and home gardens — could mean a reduction in resource consumption there as well.Now if only some of these golf clubs try to absolve themselves of their racist, sexist and other socio-exclusionary policies.In the Archives:Agro-veillanceAnd:Of golf courses, filtration plants, and green roofs Returning to Mtis/Reford [New Window]
(Rflexions colores by Hal Ingberg. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens.)Exactly four years ago today, in one of our very early posts, we noted the start of the latest edition of the International Garden Festival at Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens. We would like to tip our readers again the start over the weekend of this year's festival, which will last until 4 October. Below are some photographs of the gardens to temp you to make a trek to Quebec.While the gardens look rather inventive, something you'd expect when the designers are given absolute creative freedom, however, you can be sure that there will always be some sort Picturesque-esque visualary:(Rflexions colores by Hal Ingberg. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens.)And hyper-modern geomet-o-rama:(bois de biais by Atelier le balto. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens.)And everyday objects given post-modern cooptery for high designery:(Passe-moi un sapin Rita by Stphane HalmaVoisard, Francis Rollin and Karine Corbeil. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens.)And algorithmic computerary:(Camouflage View by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens.)And volup-terra-ry (see this one with bouncing, infectiously joyful kids):(Safe Zone by Stoss Landscape Urbanism. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens.)And green-goism (though this one isn't overtly treebuggery):(Pomme de parterre by Angela Iarocci, Claire Ironside and David Ross. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens.)And pushing-it-with-the-project-statement:(Dymaxion Sleep by Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens.)And rhythmametry:(Le jardin de btons bleus by Claude Cormier Landscape Architects. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Mtis/Reford Gardens.)It's interesting to note briefly that not one of the gardens are peddling in what Piet Oudolf, the avant-gardener of the High Line, would call the soft pornography of the flower. The installations are less about botany and almost singularly about sculpting spaces and programming them with melodrama.Go see (and play). "On" touche le fonds ...(*) [New Window]
"Parfait ton costume Jean-Jacques ! C'est bon, tu f'ras ministre de l'agricultureuh !" Une mre de famille convoque par la Brigade de rpression de la dlinquance contre la personne Paris pour avoir laiss comme commentaire sur Dailymotion la suite d'une vido de Nadine Morano "Hou la menteuse" ...L'article sur Slate (*) Comme il me fut enseign : "On est un con" ... encore faut-il dterminer dans mon propos qui est "on" ... Paris ! Paris ! Paris ! Paris ! Folle rengaine ! (*) [New Window]
"Je vous le confirme, chre Clarabelle, vous souffrez effectivement d'un "lger" souffle au coeur. Maintenant, laissez-moi vous avouer que j'ai quelque peu rat mes tudes de mdecine ..." Paris, Paris, la ville qui devrait attirer tous les joueurs !On a chant Madrid, Rome, Londres, Berlin, Amsterdam, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Paimpol et sa Paimpolaise Et Paris ? Oui, on a chant Paris et surtout sa Parisienne de cartes postales ! Mais, personne na encore chant Arthur et son baluchon dbarquant la capitale. Paris, cette ville o tout bon Franais se doit de monter un jour. Car on monte Paris. On monte la capitale. On monte chaque coin de rue de cette ville de plaisirs ! a, pour monter, il y en a pour tous les gots Paris ! Des Bleues, des Rouges, des Jaunes et des Roses ! Et je mextasie en pensant ces imbciles heureux qui croient encore depuis leurs cahutes provinciales quon monte gographiquement Paris ! Bande dignares, vous montez la plage, vous ? Vous montez la plaine aussi ? Non ! Si vous aviez suivi vos cours de biologie, vous sauriez que la capitale de votre pays est sise sur un bassin sdimentaire, soit un immense trou remblay et bien tass, pour les cantonniers. Merde ! Paris, cest au niveau de la mer, le degr zro de laltitude ! Le petit savoyard barbouill de suif, il monte depuis ses montagnes Paris ? Je sens le rouge de honte vous montez aux joues.Mais alors pourquoi dit-on monter Paris ? Mais parce quon monte ici comme ltalon monte la jument, pardi ! Paris den France, cest la capitale des jambes en lair, de la bagatelle, du froufrou, des fleurettes, du guilledou ! Paris, cest une dvergonde, une fille facile ! Paris, cest risette. Paris, cest levrette !Il ny a que le vertueux Aznavour pour nous faire croire quil est mont Paris pour finir en haut de laffiche, ce qui reprsente une vraie ascension. Parce que ses acolytes, une guitare ou une plume la main, ils sont monts Paris pour sucer du mamelon et puis ceux qui ny sont pas arrivs, ils sucent des glaons au fin fonds dun rade lenseigne Des mauvais jours o lamertume patauge dans la sciure. Mais, Paris stale au-dehors de la vitrine de ce dpotoir jaunie par le mauvais tabac. Paris, cest le festival et son feu dartifice. Paris, cest aussi clinquant que ma main avidement pose sur la fesse ferme et chaude dune femme mal marie.Nombreux sont les potes qui ont vant les aptitudes amoureuses de telle ou telle trangre. Cette littrature usurpe na aucune chance de rencontrer le moindre succs en France. Pour la simple et bonne raison que la Franaise est la plus sublime des amantes ; quelle soit de la mtropole ou des les. Et elle a mme ses spcificits rgionales !Pour a, messieurs les Anglais, les Amricains du nord et du sud, les Russes, les Asiatiques, vous pouvez piteusement bomber le torse en agitant vos pales copies de femelles amouraches, vous ne nous ferez pas bouger un cil nous les Franais : on ctoie quotidiennement ce qui se fait de mieux en la matire, et de loin ! On ne peut pas lexpliquer. Cest un fait. Un axiome indmontrable. Vous pouvez tout imiter, vous ne pourrez jamais reproduire la Franaise.(*) vieux texte rchauff ... Fait trop chaud pour crire ! Quand l'attente s'acclre ... (*) [New Window]
- Bonjour. Alors je m'appelle Vanessa et j'ai 24 ans. Je suis responsable commercial chez Djiblian, chaussure de luxes pour femmes. J'adore boire du bloody mary, mais sans excs, bien sr. Je vis actuellement seule avec Astrud, ma petite King Charles, mais j'espre bien un jour rencontrer el prince charmant. Du moins un homme qui saura relever le dfi ! (rire touff) Sinon, quoi d'autres. J'essaye de pratique le badmington au moins une fois par semaine, si j'arrive motiver un de mes amies et j'adore retrouver mes copines chez Giuliano, le petit italien du coin de la rue ...- Et vous jouez dans quelle srie ?- Je vous demande pardon ...- Non, a ne fait rien. Laissez ... tomber ...(*) Je n'ai pas trouv mieux comme citation dire ce jour. Je suis sans excuse. Guess who's coming to dinner ... [New Window]
Air du temps ... [New Window]
(C) Cary ConoverLe "Thorme du singe l'infini" soutient qu'un singe frappant le clavier d'une machine crire pour une dure de temps aussi consquente que l'infini arriverait quasi srement par rcrire une pice de William Shakespeare.La paternit de ce thorme se perd entre Aristote, Jorge Luis Borge ou Thomas Huxley.Cela a-t-il seulement une importance ? "Life is just a ride" [New Window]
"Le monde n'est qu'un tour de mange dans un parc d'attractions. Ds lors qu'on choisit de monter dans le mange on se persuade que c'est forcment la ralit, parce que notre intellect a la puissance de nous le faire croire. Et le mange va dans tout les sens, en haut, en bas. C'est plein d'excitation et de dtente, plein de couleurs vives de sons et c'est drle, pour un certain temps.Certaines personnes tournent depuis longtemps et commencent se demander si tout cela est vrai ou simplement un tour de mange ... Et d'autres personnes ont compris et viennent nous dire "T'en fais, n'aies pas peur, a n'est effectivement qu'un tour de mange !"Et la seule rponse que nous ayons est de flinguer ces gens-l !"Faites les taire ! On a trop investi dans ce tour de mange ! Faites les taire ! Regardes mes rides d'angoisses sur mon front, regarde mon compte bancaire et ma famille ! Tout a, c'est forcment vrai !"Et non, a n'est qu'un tour de mange. Et pourtant nous n'arrtons pas de faire taire ces braves types qui essayent de nous expliquer la vrit, non ? Et nous laissons nos propres dmons prendre le dessus.Mais qu'importe, puisque tout a n'est qu'un mange ! Et nous pouvons en descendre n'importe quel moment. Il suffit de le choisir. Sans effort, sans travail particulier, sans investissement ... Un choix instantan entre la peur et l'amour. (...)"Extrait du sketch final que prononait Bill Hicks lors de chacun de ses one-man-shows. Iron Man vs Bruce Lee [New Window]
a Vimeo post by Patrick Boivinlink: http://vimeo.com/user1463264 view: http://vimeo.com/3784524posted by kosso using PHREADZ Philip K. Dick: The Orange County Years [New Window]
The above image is taken from R. Crumb’s awesome “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” and you can get the whole shebang by clicking here.So have you all seen the new issue of Orange Coast magazine yet? You know, “the magazine of Orange County”? Yeah, us neither. But thankfully LA Observed checked it out [...]
Thu, 2 Jul 2009 18:09:32 -0500 Abner Graboff [New Window]
Who was Abner Graboff? I had no idea. So, I decided to find out on my own.Artist, illustrator & designer with a career that spanned several decades, from the 1940’s to the 80’s, Abner was best known for creating some of the most ingenious and vibrant children’s books during the mid-century era. But you’d never [...]
Thu, 2 Jul 2009 17:31:40 -0500 Gavin Glass [New Window]
Americana // Soul // RockWhen handed Gavin Glass’s Holy Shakers album and told it was more rock than what he’s playing with Lisa Hannigan’s ensemble, never did I expect to be astonished and excited by such genuine southern rock sounds. Born and bred in Ireland, Gavin left school at eighteen to pursue various paths [...]
Thu, 2 Jul 2009 14:30:54 -0500 Volcanic lavender sunsets? [New Window]
People across the USA (and now parts of Europe) are reporting unusual sunsets, the result of Russia’s Sarychev Peak volcano, which erupted on June 12, “hurling massive plumes of sulfur dioxide and other debris into the stratosphere. The white ripples that herald these sunsets are made of volcanic aerosols–a mixture of ash and sulfur compounds. [...]
Thu, 2 Jul 2009 11:31:27 -0500 ?THE CATERER? by Jeff Lint [New Window]
“Under our lives our death continues like the blank tape under a recording.”
Thu, 2 Jul 2009 02:40:39 -0500 Today?s Autonomedia Jubilee Saint ? Patrice Lamumba [New Window]
July 2 - PATRICE LAMUMBAMartyred Congolese pioneer of African liberation.Read Speeches and writings by Lamumba on Marxists.orgJULY 2, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALSBesse-en-Chandesse, France: The Black Virgin is carried into the mountains, where she once went on her own.Siena, Italy: Madonna di Provenzano Festival. Horse race, followed by revelry and music, in honor of armless madonna.ALSO [...]
Thu, 2 Jul 2009 00:14:30 -0500 La Linea [New Window]
Several years ago I linked to a site featuring over 50 episodes of Osvaldo Cavandoli’s wonderful series of short animations, La Linea. That link has come and gone, but I did just find an extensive YouTube playlist of 78 La Linea episodes.I loved watching these as a kid. You may recognize La Linea’s [...]
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 20:32:06 -0500 Mountain Dew History [New Window]
Click on image to download.Nice mix of rotoscoping, 2D, and 3D animation for this Mountain Dew spot, titled History. Produced by Buck, with illustrator Josh Cochran creating the look and style frames.
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 16:24:17 -0500 Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies [New Window]
Drawger has set up the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies where “tools of the trade that have died or have just about died a slow slow death are cheerfully exhibited.” I still have plenty of these kicking around from my school days — rubber cement pick-up, proportion wheel, dry cleaning pad, t-squares, triangles. I [...]
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 14:39:54 -0500 ?Start jamming, dammit!? [New Window]
Dean Wareham (ex-Galaxie 500, ex-Luna, now of Dean & Britta ‘fame’) reads a letter from a concerned Luna fan onstage…
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 13:12:49 -0500 Where's Wooster?... In The South Of France [New Window]
In a few hours we're heading to Nice for a few days of vacation over the 4th of July holiday. We won't be posting much over the next few days, but be sure to follow us on Twitter here. We'll be back to full swing on the 12th of July. Hoping everyone is having a terrific Summer! Marc and Sara...
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 13:04:31 -0500 Where's Wooster?... In The South Of France [New Window]
In a few hours we're heading to Nice for a few days of vacation over the 4th of July holiday. We won't be posting much over the next few days, but be sure to follow us on Twitter here. We'll be back to full swing on the 12th of July.Hoping everyone is having a terrific Summer!Marc and Sara
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 11:48:03 -0500 Vintage sewn clothing tags [New Window]
Enjoy this small collection of vintage sewn clothing tags over at World Famous Design Junkies. There’s something really special about these delicate little designs hiding behind people’s necks: Design in Thread.
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 10:44:32 -0500 Handmade Portraits: Birdhouseaccents vid on Etsy [New Window]
Birdhouse craftsman Fred Jakubiec made it through 25 years of jobs as a supervisor at a fast food joint, a worker at a steel mill, and a driver for FedEx before he found that he was much, much happiermaking birdhouses out of wood and found materials for thechickadees, cardinals and finchessurrounding his Connecticut home.Fred nowbuilds [...]
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 10:08:08 -0500 Mellow bottle-blowing in the lake with Hermeto Pascoal [New Window]
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 08:56:16 -0500 The Making Of.... "Love" [New Window]
Love from two twelve on Vimeo....
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 08:05:09 -0500 The Making Of.... "Love" [New Window]
Love from two twelve on Vimeo.
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 08:04:17 -0500 Today's Wooster Masthead [New Window]
Wooster Collective is a fierce supporter of those in Iran who are currently standing up and fighting for change and democracy. Today's masthead was created by a graffiti artist currently living and working in Iran. Wooster Collective is indeed a Celebration of Street Art and FREEDOM....
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 08:00:45 -0500 Today's Wooster Masthead [New Window]
Wooster Collective is a fierce supporter of those in Iran who are currently standing up and fighting for change and democracy. Today's masthead was created by a graffiti artist currently living and working in Iran. Wooster Collective is indeed a Celebration of Street Art and FREEDOM.
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 07:54:49 -0500 Masthead by Anonymous [New Window]
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 07:54:00 -0500 Masthead by Anonymous [New Window]
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 07:51:12 -0500 ?THE CATERER? by Jeff Lint [New Window]
“The great thing about being ignored is that you can speak the truth with impunity.”
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 02:38:39 -0500 Today?s Autonomedia Jubilee Saint ? Mikhail Bakunin [New Window]
July 1– MIKHAILBAKUNINConspirator, anarchist, rival of Marx, assassin of God. From Bakunin’s God and the State:“Yes, our first ancestors, our Adams and our Eves, were, if not gorillas, very near relatives of gorillas, omnivorous, intelligent and ferocious beasts, endowed in a higher degree than the animals of another species with two precious faculties-the power to [...]
Wed, 1 Jul 2009 00:48:39 -0500 Cloudy Collection, Edition 2 [New Window]
David Huyck unleashed the second edition of his super stlyish, super fun, and super affordable letterpress print set, The Cloudy Collection.Like the last set, this set of 7 prints is only $35 with free shipping, limited to 100 sets, and as of this writing there are 80 sets left. I snagged mine right away; [...]
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:04:08 -0500 The Human Printer: CMYK by hand [New Window]
The Human Printer is a group that prints CMYK dot pattern photos by hand. Using markers they replicate the halftone effect of traditional CMYK printing.(via Today and Tomorrow)
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:09:59 -0500 The Brothers McLeod blog their process [New Window]
The Brothers McLeod have been blogging the process and making of their latest short film. Check out all the work in progress posts on their blog.Previously:DoggAnimated coffee stirrersPedro and FrankensheepSpamland
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:03:11 -0500 Ben the Illustrator: making a gicle print [New Window]
Thunder Chunky offers up a step-by-step look at the creation of a gicle print by Ben the Illustrator from initial sketch to final printed product.Link: Ben the Illustrator’s Gicle Print.
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:57:05 -0500 Badly Drawn Roy [New Window]
This is pretty fun. Badly Drawn Roy is a short animated and live action mockumentary about Roy, an animated character born into a live action family.
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:52:08 -0500 CHRIS HEDGES: ?How do we reclaim the culture that was destroyed by corporations? How do we fight back now that the consumer culture has fallen into a state of decay? What can we do to reverse the cannibalization of government and the national economy by the corporations?? [New Window]
The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Freeby Chris Hedges Published on Monday, June 29, 2009 by TruthDig.comThe ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom [...]
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:07:56 -0500 THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE LAKE [New Window]
“Algonquin park… the music is coming from a headset close to us but the camera hasnt picked it up. for natural perservation of the vid we didnt edit it to put the song on it, but for ppl interested it was ‘Decade of Therion’ from Behemoth.”
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:09:33 -0500 Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair at the British Library last night [New Window]
Photo by Mostly McSweeney’s, who has notes from the lecture here
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:47:29 -0500 TextRunner un moteur de recherche smantique pour interroger le web [New Window]
OutilsMoteurRechercheWeb - OutilsWebSemantiqueTextRunner, mis en ligne rcemment par le Department of Computer Science Engineering de l''Universit de Washington, nous donne un bel avant-got de ce que l'on peut attendre de la recherche smantique.Il permet en effet d'interroger 500 millions de pages web en utilisant des triplets. Kesako? Le triplet est ce qui va vous permettre de lancer des requtes plus "intelligentes" que celles permises par les moteurs classiques en vous donnant la possibilit de les structurer un minimum. Comme son nom l'indique le triplet est compos de 3 lments : un sujet, un prdicat, un objet. Cela ne vous dit toujours rien? Alors faisons simple : Who killed Kennedy? who = sujet killed = prdicat Kennedy = objetFacile non? (que les pros du web smantique...
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:01:13 -0500 Shit We're Diggin': Eine's "The A to Z of Change" [New Window]
It's always exciting when you see an artist push his or her work into new places. We've been fans of Eine's lettering for quite a while. And for us, his new series, created for next weeks opening at the Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, takes his work to a whole new "place". The trademark typography is still in place, but in "The A Z of Change" Eine's incorporated into the work images from archival photographs that champion the actions of those who stand up against the status quo and create cultural and political movements that...
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:54:12 -0500 Shit We're Diggin': Eine's "The A to Z of Change" [New Window]
It's always exciting when you see an artist push his or her work into new places. We've been fans of Eine's lettering for quite a while. And for us, his new series, created for next weeks opening at the Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, takes his work to a whole new "place". The trademark typography is still in place, but in "The A Z of Change" Eine's incorporated into the work images from archival photographs that champion the actions of those who stand up against the status quo and create cultural and political movements that make change possible. If you are in LA, be sure to check out the new show. It looks terrific Here's the info:Show Details:Eine's "The A Z of Change"Opening Reception: Thursday July 9 2009 / 7.00pm 10.00pmExhibition Dates: July 9 July 30 2009Address: Carmichael Gallery / 1257 N. La Brea Ave / West Hollywood / CA / 90038
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:08:17 -0500 WK Book Signing And Print Release [New Window]
If you're in New York City tomorrow night (Wednesday, July 1st) be sure to stop by the Jonathan LeVive Gallery where WK will be signing his new book from 6-8pm. You can find more information here. In addition, to celebrate the new show, WK has released three new prints (shown above) that can be purchased exclusively from the gallery. We love 'em....
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:59:15 -0500 WK Book Signing And Print Release [New Window]
If you're in New York City tomorrow night (Wednesday, July 1st) be sure to stop by the Jonathan LeVive Gallery where WK will be signing his new book from 6-8pm. You can find more information here.In addition, to celebrate the new show, WK has released three new prints (shown above) that can be purchased exclusively from the gallery. We love 'em.
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:52:31 -0500 Fresh Stuff From Anthony Lister in Sydney [New Window]
More from Lister here....
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:42:25 -0500 Fresh Stuff From Anthony Lister in Sydney [New Window]
More from Lister here.
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:39:51 -0500 Fresh Stuff From Ethos in Sao Paulo [New Window]
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:38:25 -0500 Fresh Stuff From Ethos in Sao Paulo [New Window]
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:36:35 -0500 ?THE CATERER? by Jeff Lint [New Window]
“A crime doesnt have its being outside the law - the law has its being inside a crime.”
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:30:30 -0500 Today?s Autonomedia Jubilee Saint ? Mongo Beti [New Window]
June 30– MONGOBETISuperb Cameroonian novelist, biting social critic.JUNE 30, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS*Thann, France: Burning of the Three Fires. Celebrates threestars that moved to a spot over the forest in the 12th centuryand then stopped, marking the villages founding.*Festival of Endless Ass-Kissing.ALSO ON JUNE 30 IN HISTORY…1520 Aztec sovereign Montezuma II killed by conquistadores, [...]
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:15:20 -0500 Marklets.com, l'annuaire des bookmarklets [New Window]
OutilsBookmarkletsJe vous ai souvent parl des bookmarklets, ces petits bouts de codes qui s'intgrent votre navigateur comme des favoris et lui ajoutent toutes sortes de fonctionnalits (j'ai mme cr une rubrique ce sujet). Avec l'avnement des services 2.0 ils se sont multiplis un tel point qu'il devient difficile de s'y retrouver.Marklets.com est tout simplement un annuaire qui les rpertorie et vous permet de les retrouver par mots-cls. S'il ajoute une description chacun, ainsi qu'un systme d'toile permettant de faire merger les plus populaires, on regrettera qu'il ne joue pas son rle d'annuaire jusqu'au bout en les classant par catgories.En vous inscrivant au compte Twitter de Marklets vous pourrez tre alert des nouveaux bookmarklets ajouts la base.Vu chez Sylvain Drapeau.
Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:01:36 -0500 ?Good job for ruling, guys and gals.? [New Window]
From the Penetrating the Void blog, on Arthur’s just-released limited-edition Transmissions From Sinai album, curated by Al Cisneros (Om, Sleep, Shrinebuilder):“There are quite a few many beautiful gems on the new Al-Cisneros-curated mix CD from Arthur publications, entitled Tranmissions From Sinai. In all honesty, sometimes when I think I might be losing interest, these cursed [...]
Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:55:30 -0500 Rushkoff on WFMU tonight, 6pm [New Window]
Doug Rushkoff’s “Media Squat” show is broadcast tonight on WFMU at 6PM ET live from “Personal Democracy Forum” in NYC with Mark Pesce and Craig Newmark http://www.mediasquat.com/
Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:23:12 -0500 Cinnabar Chanterelles [New Window]
Came across these little gems after ripping up a beaver dam that was flooding an orchid bog. They were delicious.Cinnabar Chanterelles (Cantharellus cinnabarinus) are exploding in area forests right now. They are smaller and have a more delicate flavor than musky golden chantarelles and hearty, woodsy morels. Their flavor is subtle and is easily overwhelmed [...]
Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:18:05 -0500 Arthur Bulletin No. 153 (June 25) [New Window]
(HERE’S THE TEXT FOR ARTHUR’S LATEST OPT-IN EMAIL BULLETIN, DISPATCHED ONCE-A-WEEK, MORE OR LESS. YOU CAN SIGN UP FOR IT HERE.)“command performance”the arthur magazine email bulletin no. 000153june 25, 2009arthurmag twitter: twitter.com/arthurmagazinearthurmag blog: arthurmag.comarthurmag store: store.arthurmag.com/advertise with arthurmag: jesse@arthurmag.comWell hello there,EVENTS! EVENTS! EVENTS!Arthur Magazine “Bull Tongue” columnist Byron Coley co-curates “Unicorns Versus Mermaids,” opening IN [...]
Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:30:10 -0500 A Preview of Dan Witz' Summer Project - "Dark Doings [New Window]
(click photos above to expand) Earlier today Dan Witz sent us a preview of his summer project which he's calling "Dark Doings." He tells us - "I don't think I've ever been as excited as I am about this work I'm doing now... I'm calling it, "Dark Doings", inspired by my recent time in Amsterdam's red light district." You can see more from the series here....
Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:27:28 -0500 ?THE CATERER? by Jeff Lint [New Window]
Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:28:02 -0500 Today?s Autonomedia Jubilee Saint ? HENRILEFEBVRE [New Window]
June 29– HENRILEFEBVRERadical critic of the politics of everyday life.JUNE 29, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS*Russia: St. Peters Day. Celebration of the Funeral of Kostrama: Bonfires kindled; maiden chosen to be carried in procession and to reign over games and dancing.* Sacrament of the Silicon Host.ALSO ON JUNE 29 IN HISTORY…48 BC Julius Caesar bests [...]
Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:15:48 -0500
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