Art + Architecture + Design
Archive for March, 2007
Ann’s Snack Bar: WSJ’s Beefy Prose
Mar 13th
WSJ "…
But the outstanding hamburger experience I found in an odyssey of several months and thousands of miles was at Ann’s Snack Bar, a justifiably renowned little diner on a broken-down industrial stretch of highway. Miss Ann, as habitués call her, is a woman of commanding style and ready banter. She works alone at her grill, patting each ample patty lightly as she sets it down. Her masterpiece, the "ghetto burger," is a two-patty cheeseburger tricked out with bacon that she tends closely in a fryolator…Then Miss Ann dusts your almost-ready patties with "seasoned salt" tinged red from cayenne pepper. It looks like a mistake, too much, over the top. But when you get your ghetto burger in its handsomely toasted bun envelope, you regret doubting the lady for one second. The big burgers stand up fine to the spice. This is the next level in burgerhood. And it just barely fits in your mouth.
Gridskipper said: "Really, Ray, "and it just barely fits in your mouth," that’s the way you’re gonna end it? It looks like a mistake, too much, over the top."
But it sounds good to us here at (incli)NATION! (and thanks for the pic because really, that’s what this post is all about…
The Best Burger [WSJ]
Ann’s Snack Bar
via Gridskipper
Smartpox Rocks: Viral Marketing For YOU!
Mar 13th
Yet another viral marketing scheme? With this gadget you can register your email, url, phone number etc and get a little code block that will represent it. Scenesters "in-the-know" can then take a photo of the code (that you have cleverly placed on posters, flyers, [spraypainted--not authorized]) and then decode it with a little bit of software to find out who/what you are. Might be cool if it catches on:
"There is yet another way for the tech savvy set to express and promote themselves. By creating 2D barcodes (or “pox”), users can share text, links to one’s social network page or email address that can be picked up by strangers using their camera phones. Smartpox is a mobile “viral messaging” application that enables users to make these barcode tags containing personalized data which can then be put on business cards, stickers, posters, or other outdoor mediums for people to see and decode with Java-enabled phones.
After installing the Smartpox reader, phones capture and scan the pox-laden image to decode the information. For example, one may be planning a party or scavenger hunt and can embed directions/clues within the pox for the invitees to use. Bands can create tour posters with tags of their MP3s for fans to instantly access by taking a photo with their cell using Smartpox. For those with equipped camera phones, posting and sharing personal barcodes offline is a novel way to share information with people online.
No one Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
Mar 12th
Miranda July’s new book, No one Belongs Here More Than You gets some celebrity kudos from David Byrne:
I had recently read her book of collected short stories which is due out in about a month — No one Belongs Here More Than You — which are so good I was both inspired and jealous. Why jealous, I don’t know, I don’t aspire to write fiction. They are sweet, tender, innovative and sexy in a sometimes slightly disturbing way. It’s almost shocking to read or see — as in the case of the performance — something that is contemporary, post-modern, whatever, but also full of tenderness and appreciation for the subtle, funny and delicate connections between people.
Stilts: Not Just for the Circus
Mar 12th
In 1891 a young French baker named Sylvain Dornon walked from Paris to Moscow, a journey of 1,800 miles, on a pair of five-foot stilts. At an average pace of over 30 miles a day, the trip took just under two months. Dornon belonged to the Tchangue, a group of stilt walking shepherds from Les Landes, France. From an 1891 article in Scientific American:
Mounted on their stilts, the shepherds of Landes drive their flocks across the wastes, going through bushes, brush and pools of water, and traversing marshes with safety, without having to seek roads or beaten footpaths. Moreover, this elevation permits them to easily watch their sheep, which are often scattered over a wide surface.
The Tchangue knows very well how to preserve his equilibrium; he walks with great strides, stands upright, runs with agility, or executes a few feats of true acrobatism, such as picking up a pebble from the ground, plucking a flower, simulating a fall and quickly rising, running on one foot, etc.”
At the Same Time by Susan Sontag
Mar 12th
"The amplified note of despair and loss in “At the Same Time” makes Sontag resemble one of the European “last” intellectuals she often wrote about, “that Saturnine hero of modern culture” standing alone in the ruins of history. This anguish may seem exaggerated, part of her frequently noted self-regard. But, in her later weariness with modern civilization, Sontag fulfilled a particularly American destiny. Gertrude Stein once claimed that America was the oldest country in the world, since it was the “mother of the 20th-century civilization.” Sontag, who had a tragic sense of history rarely found among her peers, never failed to absorb the lessons of her country’s old age and accumulated experience of modernity. It is why the melancholy and occasional bitter wisdom of her last writings appear to be of a mature and passionately engaged American rather than of a marginal and jaded European sensibility — one that has not only learned from the past but, by grappling vigorously with the present, can also divine, if gloomily, the future."
via NYT
Lunar Eclipse by Akira Rabelais
Mar 9th
Today begins the first in a series of original essays by Akira Rabelais. Musician, composer, artist, programmer and writer; Rabelias will be posting pieces of his journals, essays and other writings on Elvis impersonators, sake bombs, film, music, politics and jelly bellys.
Friday, six days before the full lunar eclipse. work, day job compositing obscure scifi images. lunch, no lunch… oolong tea. it’s hot outside, I’m sitting behind double locked doors in a cold room. conversation with a coworker about the Ottoman Empire… he’s some sort of Goth, shaved head severe black rimmed glasses biker boots… but no visible ink or stainless steel. he’s emphatic that reinstalling the ‘Young Turks’ would settle Iraq right down… he’s eating a handful of irregular jelly belly beans from a four pound bag. a well meaning producer placed it in the room a few days ago… it’s all the reject jelly bellys, the ones that are siamesetwinned together, oddly shaped or not quite the right colour. I’m singing Niko Case to myself ("hanging round the ceiling half the time hanging round the ceiling half the time") as as he grinds the little candies and rehearses an idealized mollification of the middle east… I can’t help but mark to myself that the bag’s been rummaged through by two guys who never wash their hands after pissing. work slouches towards Bethlehem, off. I’m driving over the hill down to a screening of a friend’s new film…
fictitious college kids plagued with vampires and poor lighting. ditch the after party, I’m hungry and a have ritual tonight. drive to Ralph’s on Sunset and Fuller… three pineapples, bananas, chicken pot pies, soy milk, wine. a cute and rather young cashier makes eyes at me. I think she’s taken in by my pineapples. Home… good to be home. open the door think hi to the plants in their subtle drift. things in bags go to various places and I can take off my boots. it’s an night that I yearly celebrate, September first…
I open a bottle (65% Shiraz 35% Cabernet Sauvignon), put Secrets of the Beehive on in the bathroom… sitting on the floor in dark, drinking wine and grounding out with David… "the sun shines high above the sounds of laughter the birds swoop down upon the crosses of old grey churches we say that we’re in love while secretly wishing for rain sipping coke and playing games September’s here again September’s here again". Friday turns Saturday… then three am, I’m processing guitar tracks in the background and writing wavecycle code… sometime after four still drinking wine, digging around in my dsp functions… I notice a comment in the header from a couple of years ago:
/*
deep to a fountain
by change, to the home
of her beautiful mouth emphatic.
sixth angel poured out of salt
dissolved in search of now
fenceless world and winds
wake the sole wrought…
*/
my code is sprinkled with these little comments of poetry. my mentor at gradschool thought it was funny that I don’t notate how the functions work, but instead write these little fragments. it’s late and I’m tired. sleep.
Saturday morning, construction across the street starts at seven am, hammering… I’m fucking thirsty. really shouldn’t drink wine so late…
piss, and back to sleep. North Hollywood is loud these days. the Arts District as it’s called is getting a tidal wave of capital investment from city… it manifests like a three dimensional chess game played out by five thousand illegal Mexican construction workers. huge apartments are going up on three sides of me. hundreds and hundreds of little rooms and lives soon to be, but it’s driving the rent up and mostly the artists have to leave…
I have to move soon. the beeping of a half dozen forklifts backing up rounds my second sleep.
a little after noon I get up again… boil water to black tea and stretching. set the timer on the microwave to 4:32, steeping… hamstring stretches on the kitchen bar. tea, email… sitting at my oak desk in forest green Calvin Klein boxer briefs… shit, so much email. three hours later I’m drinking the last sip of cold tea still typing… enough. shower. I love the shower. it my favorite place to listen… the music I make has to pass is the shower test. I’m obsessed with the ‘Fox Confessor Brings The Flood’… warm water and soap: ‘driving home I see those flooded fields how can people not know what beauty this is? I’ve taken it for granted my whole life since the day I was born, clouds hang on these curves like me and I kneel to the wheel of the fox confessor on splendid heels, he shames me from my seat and on my guilty feet I follow him in retreat, what purpose in these deeds oh fox confessor please who married me to these orphan blues, it¹s not for you to know but for you to weep and wonder, when the death of your civilization precedes you… I flooded my sleeves as I drove home again.’
around six I’m sitting in the Starbucks across the street, drinking a five shot Americano and reading ‘Of Human Bondage’ by Somerset Maugham…
–
‘He waited under the stars, sitting on the stile, and the hedges with their ripening blackberries were high on each side of him. From the earth rose rich scents of the night, and the air was soft and still. His heart was beating madly. He could not understand anything of what happened to him.
He associated passion with cries and tears and vehemence, and there was nothing of this in Sally; but he did not know what else but passion could have caused her to give herself. But passion for him? He would not have been surprised if she had fallen to her cousin, Peter Gann, tall, spare, and straight, with his sunburned face and long, easy stride. Philip wondered what she saw in him. He did not know if she loved him as he reckoned love.
And yet? He was convinced of her purity. He had a vague inkling that many things had combined, things that she felt though was unconscious of, the intoxication of the air and the hops and the night, the healthy instincts of the natural woman, a tenderness that overflowed, and an affection that had in it something maternal and something sisterly; and she gave all she had to give because her heart was full of charity.
He heard a step on the road, and a figure came out of the darkness.’
–
…about an hour later I’m packing my messenger bag with the tascam hdp2, rode nt4 stereo mic, green apple gum and a cdr of the fox confessor for good luck. walk over to the subway with my gear, it’s not far. three stops to Hollywood Boulevard and Highland. tonight I’m working on a set of Hollywood field recordings. I mark out my territory, between Betty Grable and Rod Serling’s stars… I walk the circuit. it’s insanity… a crush of people wondering around. I hear passing conversations in French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Armenian… others I can’t identify. I hold the microphone at waist level, most don’t notice it. they’re looking up wide eyed partially open mouthed or down at the stars. some of the professionals notice… panhandlers, performers, cops, drug dealers, prostitutes… they notice, but they’re professionals. I don’t fuck with them and they don’t fuck with me. The din is glorious… conversations, cars passing slow with a wide tapestry of beats and flavours with the wash street performers, motorcycles and small shops bleeding black metal, ritmo, rap, country, gamelan, jpop, disco, house, reggaeton into the street. I hear Michael Jackson again and again… and he’s on the street, twice over. Two Michael Jacksons taking pictures with star struck tourists in front of the Mann Chinese. The Scientologists are out… they’ve got a dozen folding tables on the street manned in force by the faithful clad in black polos administering tests with metal rods and putting down the L. Ron mind trick.
on my first pass by one of them tries to chat me up, I counter with High Plains Drifter and point the mic at him. he stops short and turns away…
over the next three hours I pass a dozen or so times and none of them even look at me. as I pass, I pickup little bits of their conversations… "how does it make you feel when she does that?"… "wouldn’t you rather find the power to trust in yourself?"
around and around I go… I’ve noticed a sort of crazy look that the transients have down there, two hours of walking the circuit I feel it seeping into me. My left eye starts to twitch a little.
my friends Kevin and Steve show up. they pull me out of the cacophony and take me to dinner. these two guys are great… Chinese twins from Hawaii.
Kevin and I worked at Disney together a few years back and I met Steve soon after… they’ve been my good partners in crime ever since. we head east for Thai, it’s about eleven. stop at the Palms it’s a place famous for Thai Elvis impersonator, but he’s not on tonight… it’s this fat white guy garishly singing along with eighties hits… ‘I’m on a ride and I want to get off But they wont slow down the roundabout, I sold the Renoir and the tv set, Don’t want to be around when this gets out’… fucking hungry. I order fried squid, spicy noodle soup (dry) and a Singha. a long table next next to us is full of college dudes and high school girls… several times it erupts with ’1, 2, 3 Sake Bomb!’. the squid is good. two beers latter we pay and start to get the f out… the twins have to go and fat white guy ‘Come On Ilene’ with rhinestones is wearing thin.
Fab Tree Hab: Full-Contact Design. Watch the YouTube
Mar 8th
Watch the YouTube flythrough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcBpwJ0xYG4
Check out the "Fab Tree Hab" the first all-green home design we’ve seen. This has changed my thinking about building green.
Insteat of low-impact residential design, I’m thinking of this as full-contact residential design. The point is to fully embrace and design the landscape you inhabit, rather than the now-fashionable, small-footprint-light-on-the-land ethos now in vogue. It opens up a whole new dialog that is additive rather than reductive. It’s empowering, don’t you think?
According to the Vancouver Sun: "Instead of being just environmentally friendly, the structures would naturally blend in with surrounding ecosystems, he said.
"The group is currently working with Plantware, an Israeli arboriculture firm, to test techniques for growing the lattice-like weave of vines and roots that would help form the walls of the homes. The design technique combines an ancient gardening technique called pleaching — the weaving together of tree branches to form living archways and lattices — with computer technology that controls the growth and shape of a tree.
"Based on a computer model, wooden jigs would be placed at key portions of young saplings in order to guide the formation of the walls and roof. A dense layer of vines and other plants would be grown to reinforce the exterior, which would also feature soy-based plastic windows."
When do we start building…sorry…planting?
Here is NYC, circa 2107 using terraforming on the left, and current pleaching on the right…
thanks ArchNewsNow
Baudrillard Passes; 1929 – 2007
Mar 8th
French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard has died aged 77 at his home in Paris following a long illness.
"Philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard has died in Paris at age 77. Obituaries in the Guardian, here and in Le Monde, here. An excerpt from the Guardian:
Baudrillard…attracted widespread notoriety for predicting that the first Gulf war, of 1991, would not take place. During the war, he said it was not really taking place. After its conclusion, he announced, imperturbably, that it had not taken place. This prompted some to characterise him as yet another continental philosopher who revelled in a disreputable contempt for truth and reality.
Yet Baudrillard was pointing out that the war was conducted as a media spectacle. Rehearsed as a wargame or simulation, it was then enacted for the viewing public as a simulation: as a news event, with its paraphernalia of embedded journalists and missile’s-eye-view video cameras, it was a videogame. The real violence was thoroughly overwritten by electronic narrative: by simulation.
Gallic hyperbole? Weigh this reminder (from Thomas Friedman):
In an interview last Jan. 16, Jim Lehrer asked President Bush why, if the war on terrorism was so overwhelmingly important, he had never asked more Americans “to sacrifice something.” Mr. Bush gave the most unbelievable answer: “Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.”
Or, as Baudrillard put it: "Welcome to the desert of the real."
You will be missed…
via Leiter Reports
West Bank Graffiti: Muheisen Photographs Israel’s Separation Barrier
Mar 7th
It never ceases to amaze me how art survives in even the most horrific environments. I first saw this powerful picture on Wooster Collective and I had to know more about it. So I tracked down the photographer, Muhammed Muheisen and Emailed him. Here is what he had to say:
"Backdropped by a section of Israel’s separation barrier, Israeli troops fire rubber bullets at Palestinian stone throwers, not seen, during clashes in the West Bank village of Kalandia between Jerusalem and Ramallah, Friday, Feb. 9, 2007. Throughout the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians protested against Israel’s renovation works near the disputed Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)
Thanks Muhammed. Send us more!
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