the year 2015

and now.......page 2

what you see here was the first letter, and invitation of sorts, to the great coffee experiment of 2002. the names of the involved (me) have been removed to protect anonymity. please realize that at the time i devised this, and began recording data, i was unemployed, and by all accounts, had too much time on my hands.

in the coming days you will learn of a great coffee experiment that i devised and took part in during the year of 2002. please keep your eyes open for it.

Lee Friedlander is selling photographs to benefit the New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund. Certainly a good cause. The pictures, on view at MoMA's lobby, can be purchased through Friedlander's New York gallery.

holy cow....genius of the week...ok maybe not quite genius, but give me a little latitude..I love this guy. Way back to all of those 80's WPIX games...damn those were the days...

phillip francis "scooter" rizzuto

Philip Francis Rizzuto born September 25, 1917 is a former Major League Baseball player and radio/television sports announcer. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a streetcar motorman. Despite his diminutive size (usually listed during his player career as five feet, six inches tall and 160 pounds), he played both baseball and football at Richmond Hill High School in Queens, New York.

Rizzuto played his first major-league game on April 14, 1941. For his entire 13 year career in the major leagues, he played for the New York Yankees, almost exclusively as a shortstop. Like many baseball players, he left the game for a stint in the Navy during World War II, from 1943 through 1945, where he played on the Navy's baseball team. He was voted Most Valuable Player in the American League in 1950. He played in five All-Star Games, in 1942 and each year from 1950 to 1953. Also, in 1950, he won the Hickok Belt as top professional athlete of the year. He was known as "the Scooter," a nickname given to him by a manager in the minor leagues in tribute to his fielding range.

He was released by the Yankees on August 25, 1956. After retiring, he served for 40 years broadcasting Yankee games on radio and TV where, like Harry Caray, his popular catchphrase was "Holy Cow." Although Caray was using the phrase while Rizzuto was still playing, Rizzuto once claimed he'd been saying it earlier, as a suggestion of something to say instead of using profanity.

"endtroducing"
dj shadow
1996

damn this is a most fantastic mo wax record. i must have rocked this one for at least two years straight. even wikipedia gives props. who remembers organ donor?...damn!


Best Foot Forward
Building Steam With a Grain of Salt
The Number Song
Changeling
What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4)
Untitled
Stem/Long Stem
Mutual Slump
Organ Donor
Why Hip Hop Sucks in '96
Midnight In a Perfect World
Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain
What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1 - Blue Sky Revisit)

i read an interesting article today in the ny times about an exhibition at the american folk art museum entitled obsessive drawing:

"But why, if Mr. Andolsek wasn't thinking art, or audience, did he do what he did for so long, drawing thousands of pictures over 50 years? Because he wanted to, and because he had to, which in his case are more or less the same thing. The act of drawing and painting, he has said, helped to ease a debilitating anxiety that had dogged him all his life. Once he started a drawing, the anxiety lifted. Relief arrived as a state of entrancement."

by the way.....it is my humble opinion that the american folk art museum is one of the best buildings in new york....check it out

i have decided to put together a biennale of sorts, and round up a set of links for some architecture offices web sites i find myself visiting, or that i just find interesting. please explore at will.........

snohetta
dda
axis mundi
bentel & bentel
beyhan karahan
bohlin cywinski jackson
eisenman architects
fougeron architecture
grafton architects
murdock young
john ronan
kenzo tange associates
leroy street studio
machado and silvetti
open office
polshek partnership
renzo piano
resolution: 4
richard meier & partners
thomas phifer and partners
pugh & scarpa
twbta

thats enough for now

great artwork....see below

this past saturday, me and the gang took the old plymouth out to the track and had a real good time......

are you a fan of car manuals? i am..or at least i am a fan of the old ones. if you find yourself so inclined, go take a look see at old iron online, (the old car manual project).

"larry..for the last time, get the hell out of my office"

"electric mud"
muddy waters
1968

I Just Want To Make Love To You
I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man
Let's Spend The Night Together
She's All Right
I'm A Man (Mannish Boy)
Herbert Harper's Free Press
Tom Cat
The Same Thing

Electric Mud, a 1968 album by Muddy Waters, is considered variously as a groundbreaking experiment, a travesty against the blues, and/or a commercial sell-out.

Riding the wave of the folk-rock boom of the 1960s as well as a revived interest in the original form spurred by the success of blues-based rockers such as The Rolling Stones, Waters had found a mainstream white audience after more than two decades of jukebox race music hits on Chess Records and playing the Chicago blues club circuit. In an attempt to capitalize on this new popularity, producer Marshall Chess (son of label founder and owner Leonard Chess) convinced Waters to move away from the traditional acoustic and blues styles he had become famous for and "modernize" his sound. Chess brought in a host of studio musicians and worked up Jimi Hendrix-inspired psychedelic rock arrangements of several Waters classics, some new material, and a cover of the Stones' "Let's Spend The Night Together".

woody allen

i know his most recent movies have become a bit contrived, and really sometimes not so funny or even entertaining, but i still like his old stuff. i especially enjoy a little mockumentary from 1983 named zelig i managed to catch this past weekend.

Woody Allen, born Allen Stewart Konigsberg on December 1, 1935, is an American short story writer, screenwriter, and film director whose large body of work and cerebral style have made him one of the most widely respected and prolific filmmakers in the modern era. He writes and directs his own movies and has acted in many of them as well. Allen draws heavily on literature, philosophy, European cinema and most importantly, New York City, where he was born and in which he has lived all his life, for much of his inspiration; indeed, his onscreen persona is the quintessential New York Jewish intellectual: neurotic and self-absorbed, cosmopolitan yet insecure, with a self-deprecating sense of humor.

when i was in third grade, nothing was cooler than a great watch

take a break from all of those high-brow conversations about deeper meanings, symbolism, theme, and other such fancy subjects you like to fancy yourself an expert in, and enjoy a nice visit to the museum of bad art.

as i lay in the grass one evening, recently at an outdoor concert, someone pointed out a star which seemingly was moving across the sky. they told me that the moving star was in fact a satellite. could you really see a satellite with the naked eye? this debate came up again on my parents back deck this past weekend. it seems others have pondered this, and our good friends at nasa have taken the time to answer.

good old boys
randy newman
1974

"louisiana 1927"

What has happened down here is the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through cleard down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne

CHORUS
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tyrin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, "Little fat man isn't it a shame what the river has done
To this poor crackers land.

CHORUS

"when the levee breaks"
1929

If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay
Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan
Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan
Thinkin' 'bout my baby and my happy home
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
And all these people have no place to stay
Now look here mama what am I to do
Now look here mama what am I to do
I ain't got nobody to tell my troubles to
I works on the levee mama both night and day
I works on the levee mama both night and day
I ain't got nobody, keep the water away
Oh cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do no good
Oh cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do no good
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to lose
I works on the levee, mama both night and day
I works on the levee, mama both night and day
I works so hard, to keep the water away
I had a woman, she wouldn't do for me
I had a woman, she wouldn't do for me
I'm goin' back to my used to be
I's a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan
I's a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan
Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home

Note: origin: from the old French word lev'e, act of raising, from lever to raise. An embankment for preventing flooding, or a river landing place, also, a continuous dike or ridge (as of earth) for confining the irrigation areas of land to be flooded. A levee camp therefore is a work camp for building or improving dikes to prevent rivers from flooding the land, primarily in the Mississippi Delta area.

the interdictor is an incredible hour by hour account via blog of one's man's experience while camped out up on the 10th floor of a highrise in a data center.

andreas palladio
1508-1580

Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, known to history as "Palladio," was born in 1508 in Padua, a mainland possession of the island-based Republic of Venice. Apprenticed to a stonecutter in Padua when he was 13 years old, Andrea broke his contract after only 18 months and fled to the nearby town of Vicenza. In Vicenza he became an assistant in the leading workshop of stonecutters and masons.

Palladio learned the principles of Vitruvius, the classical Roman architect whose treatise had been rediscovered in the prior century, and of the Renaissance commentator, Leon Battista Alberti. Through personal contact, he became acquainted with the ideas and works of pioneering architects of his own period, including Giulio Romano, Giovanni Maria Falconetto, Sebastiano Serlio and Michele Sanmicheli.

Palladio was an accomplished user of the new technology of movable type, then only about one hundred years old. His first book was a guide to the classical ruins of Rome, prompted presumably by his own frustrations in attempting to locate various monuments during his visits to that city. He also published, with his sons, a new translation of Caesar's Commentaries and contributed illustrations to Daniele Barbaro's annotated edition of Vitruvius' treatise on classical architecture.

Then, in 1570, following years of preparation, he published in Venice the masterwork that ensured his place in architectural history, I Quattro Libri dell' Architettura [The Four Books of Architecture].

palladio centre and museum
books
great buildings online
villas
giaconi watercolors