LightWidget - Responsive Widget for Instagram

00
I found this photo of G.H. @hovagimyangh in the papers of Cosmos Sarchiopone (1931-2011), researching photos for G.H.’s catalogue raisonnée coming out in the fall. G.H. is pictured here sitting on the radiator smoking a cigarette at an opening at 112 Greene Street, where he was acting as the de facto gallery manager. That night in 1973 they were showing work by the German video artist Ulrike Rosenbach as a part of a series of video screenings organized by Willoughby Sharp, curator and co-founder of Avalanche magazine. Cosmos extensively documented the downtown art world in the 1970s and beyond. His photos appeared in Avalanche and New York @nymag magazine, but Cosmos was known to be always carrying a camera, and his archives are largely unpublished and unexhibited. Cosmos was present around the 112 Greene Street @white_columns gallery and the artist’s restaurant Food during the formation of SoHo as an artist’s community, among other places. He left his papers to the Smithsonian Archives @smithsonianarchives —with rights designated as free for research and non-commercial use—but the Smithsonian is closed until the pandemic ends. This photo was on a contact sheet they had digitized, which we ordered a high-resolution scan of for the book. The biographical note in Cosmos’s papers says he attended John Cage’s class at the New School in 1961, which would place him close proximity to the Fluxus group that formed in part through those classes, starting a year or two earlier. The style of ad hoc urbanism characterized by New York during the period, resulting from another period of planned failure and withdrawal of resources from cities, has often been idealized. As we seem to be on a edge of another period of transition and policy-making for a new era, with commercial retail and restaurants going out of business and vacancy accelerating, we can look back at this moment to observe again how it unfolded and ask how individuals and communities can be better sustained for the benefit of human and multi-species existence. There is another way. I sent my files for G.H. HOVAGIMYAN: SITUATIONIST FUNHOUSE to ORO Editions @oro_editions last week.
00
It is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit among the flux of happenings. Something had pestered me so much I thought my heart would break. I mean, the mechanical part. I went down in the afternoon to the sea which held me, until I grew easy. About tomorrow, who knows anything. Except that it will be time, again, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit. -Mary Oliver, Swimming, One Day in August
00
Poolside chat in Palm Beach County (Elderly woman walking in pool) Gas prices are up. It was just 2.39, it’s 2.69 already now. (Senior in folding chair) Yeah they’re in power, that’s what it’s going to be like now, they’re happy with it. (EWWIP) They don’t care, they can do whatever they want now. (SIFC) They’re probably making money off of it. That Hunter Biden, probably getting rich. (Elderly man in folding chair under tent) They’re going to find out about it with the investigations, it’s all going to come out. (SIFC) That Biden, he’s the richest person ever to be president. A doctor! He’s 79 years old. I bet he never treated a patient. He’s been a bureaucrat his whole life. (EWWIP) They shut down the pipeline. (SIFC) 115,000 jobs, they don’t care. (EMIFCUT) They’re destroying the country. (EWWIP) Trump is being quiet in Palm Beach. (SIFC) When he comes out he’s going to come out fighting big time. (EMIFCUT) Big time, oh boy. (EWWIP) They’re going to try to get him for every little thing, his taxes, his property in New York. (EMIFCUT) The Democrats, everything is political. (EWWIP) Nancy Pelosi, did you see about the ice cream in her refrigerator? On Jimmy Kimmel? (SIFC) Trump wrote to him, called him no talent Jimmy Kimmel, ha ha. (EWWIP) Ice cream in her refrigerator! What was that about?! (SIFC) They’re rich too, D'Alesandro, biggest slumlord in San Francisco. They ruined that city. It used to be beautiful. Now you see homeless people everywhere. (EMIFCUT) I went there before, it was beautiful. Now you have homeless people living under bridges. (SIFC) Biggest slumlord in San Francisco. (EWWIP) With the Democrats, the country is being destroyed. (SIFC) Did you see about Minneapolis, they’re still burning buildings, the animals. (Me listening silently, trying to be zen but failing, shouting angrily) Guy, listen, you can’t be calling people animals. (SIFC) I didn’t say animals. Who said animals? (Me) You can’t be calling people animals. (EMIFCUT) He didn’t say animals. (EWWIP) He’s a leftist. [Silence. A beat] Yeah those gas prices, 2.69 a gallon now. (SIFC) My guy would pump it for 2.19, not even self-service.
00
Cynicism is a short bet against the future; you say it’s not possible to change; this effort to reimagine the world will fail; governance cannot be reformed; media cannot not be forced to stop propagating lies. When you short the future, you sell it off quickly, anticipating it will lose value. You take a profit from decline at the expense of the future. You invest in perpetuating failure: if the future gains in value you will lose your shirt and be made to look like a fool. In the Gen-X era, we were taught that nothing could change. Thus we became ironic. The society would provide no support, so you better sell-out quickly. We produced the dot-com bubble and the speculative crash of the 1990s; those who sold out got rich and then poor. We learned to obsess over work because it was the only thing that protected us against poverty, abandonment, abjection. Short-term profits became the unquestionable dominant ideology of our time. It left the world and its institutions in ruin. Retirement savings depended on this ruin. Then the pandemic came. It was an instant phenomenological leveler, despite the radically disparate harm and cult-like politicization. Everyone had to psychologically deal with the virus. It removed all of our weak ties and social appointments; work became secondary to life and survival. Meditation became pervasive, the valuing of phenomenal experience, the awareness of time passing, taking breaths, touching base with those in need of care and support, mutual aid. Space and time distorted, became quantum, punctuated by moments of epiphany, joy, transcendence. Organizing became possible. Concepts and planning for a non-dystopian future. Video: The Misfits, 1961. Written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. For Gable it was released posthumously, and Monroe died the following year.
00
In the near future, we’ll shape the world according to our ideal imaginaries of how to organize local and global institutions, creating a new multilateral world system liberated from the obligation to bow down to national identities, but intensely local and particular, rooted in places and adapted to regional climate conditions, honoring cultural belief systems and the gods each place worships. The new world system will be governed by a hybrid of layered identities and discourses, making use of human rights as a basis for regulating the expectation of societies for equal treatment, making use of markets to the extent they compensate producers and makers for their fairly compensated labor, and making use of social distribution of basic goods to the extent that every individual depends on and can expect access to them: a place to live, basic commodities such as food to eat, water to drink, transport, health care, education. Other species will also have a newly established right to exist within a shared habitat with humanity, and development cannot proceed without establishing its form is consonant with the thriving of plants and animals in the surroundings. A world government will have relays that enable small communal entities and large metropolitan regions to immediately communicate their needs and wants, responding to crises as well as the well-being and happiness of global citizens...join us in imagining the next world on Thursday at 5 pm Pacific/ 8 pm Eastern/ 2 am West African Standard Time to participate in a discussion with immigration attorney Al Ramos, urban planner Aurash Khawarzad @rashipress , space architect Claude Boullevraye de Passillé @cboullevrayedepassille , systems theorist James Andrews, sculptor Raphaele Shirley @raphaele_shirley , African media scholar Tunde Onikoyi @babsmickoy , College of Creative Studies dean emeritus Vince Carducci @vincecarducci , architect William Rockwell @williamrockwell , artist Yann Meurot, and myself, hosted by @saraedean and @ccadesignfutures @cacollegeofarts (link in profile) Images collected by @raphaele_shirley as a part of Sci-Fi Futures/ Starfishina: starfishina.tumblr.com
00
Ironically I’m in South Florida, in Palm Beach County, just as the ex-president-who-never-should-have-been was arriving here to his golf course. I was waiting for five years for this cancer to disappear from public life, yet here I am in lovely 70-degree weather ensconced in the retrograde landscapes of presumably dredged swamps converted into (relatively affordable) condos and golf courses. Fortunately in the good company of family, yet the habit of keeping cable news running during the day is keeping the poisonous language of the Trumpist white nationalists ever-present, with hosts screaming all day about the perceived terror of canceled speech, pipeline construction ended, Portland riots, corrupt public officials fired, indigenous people allowed to travel freely, Democrats rejecting unity by passing legislation and signing executive orders they campaigned on. A couple of days ago country club white nationalist Matt Schlapp, head of the American Conservative Union and paid Fox contributor, was on the morning show using the neofascist slur “democucks.” Anyone using this kind of viciously hateful language should be fired and not brought back into public life. Let them go back to whatever they did before politics and make an honest living. My dad says the retirees are growing too old to play golf here, so they’re letting some of the courses go to seed. Let these white nationalists do the same. Probably fifty years on this lines of (mangrove?) trees along the condo/golf course communities have grown up nicely.
00
Coming up on January 28, 5 pm Pacific Time; 8 pm Eastern Time; 2 am West African Standard Time: Designing a Non-Dystopian Future [link in profile] We invite you to participate in a discussion to help shape, visualize, and realize propositions for an alternative future. Critically analyzing media’s role in perpetuating disinformation or enabling common understanding, conceptualizing frameworks to update outmoded institutions, and researching economic thinking that gives people greater freedom in comparison to capital, the Amplifier group has been functioning as a speculative think-tank that uses interdisciplinary approaches to reimagine systems and advocate policies for a non-dystopian future. Participants include artist/media-and-systems theorist J. Andrews, African film scholar Tunde Onikoyi, immigration attorney/theater impresario Alfonso Ramos, architect/local political activist William Rockwell, sculptor Raphaele Shirley, and architecture journalist/organizer Stephen Zacks. Our first initiative, launched on November 25th, 2020 is a declaration on indigenous freedom of movement within the Western Hemisphere in response to human rights abuses, failed border policies, and the unaddressed legacies of colonialism in the Americas. @ccadesignfutures @amplifypolicy @williamrockwell @babsmickoy @raphaele_shirley @saraedean
00
New book buying spree plus drinks at the La Diagonal Agaveria with a member of my friends-and-family pod, as they say, includes T.J. Demos, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing, after his fantastic talk this week on Radical Futurisms: Insurgent Universality, Solidarity, and Worlds-to-Come [link to video in profile]; Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, because how we gain empirical information and knowledge about what is true and what exists has never been more essential; and lectures of Foucault at the Collège de France on biopolitics and governmentality, because thinking about how we are governed—and believing we can be governable—is equally fundamental right now. But first, another preoccupation, a passage from Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes on the favoring of visual metaphors as an expression of thinking: “Even a rapid glance at the language we commonly use will demonstrate the ubiquity of visual metaphors. If we actively focus our attention on them, vigilantly keeping an eye out for those deeply embedded as well as those on the surface, we can gain an illuminating insight into the complex mirroring of perception and language. Depending, of course, on one’s outlook or point of view, the prevalence of such metaphors will be accounted an obstacle or an aid to our knowledge of reality. It is, however, no idle speculation or figment of imagination to claim that if blinded to their importance, we will damage our ability to inspect the world outside and introspect the world within. And our prospects for escaping their thrall, if indeed that is even a foreseeable goal, will be greatly dimmed. In lieu of an exhaustive survey of such metaphors, whose scope is far too broad to allow an easy synopsis, this opening paragraph should suggest how ineluctable the modality of the visual actually is, at least in our linguistic practice. I hope by now that you, optique lecteur, can see what I mean.” — Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought by Martin Jay
00
Let’s be clear that the President of the United States was using Facebook, Twitter, and the power of his office as part of an ONGOING violent criminal conspiracy to organize the overthrow of the U.S. government, and that’s why he was banned and is being impeached. It would be reassuring to have the FBI (or anyone) hold a press conference explaining what they are doing to stop it. We are now at the most extreme moment of institutional failure. Once the threat has been defeated, it’s time to identify the sources of failure in media and governance and respond with systemic changes.
00
It’s hard to exactly recommend Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, since it’s a horribly depressing story of a family’s financial struggles as gig workers in a so-called sharing economy. (Remember when we thought sharing meant sharing wealth rather than expropriating labor and funneling profits to shareholders?) Yet I was glad I watched it for the powerful memory it brought of what it means to experience financial insecurity, being that kid whose parents are working three part-time jobs—adjunct teaching, clerking in bookstores, paralegal, etc—but still can’t keep the electricity and phone on, who feels neglected and starts to get into trouble at school, rebelling, staying with friends to escape. Some of it is over-the-top melodrama, but it’s accurate. It’s just hard to watch, for the same reason that it was shameful to my mother to experience poverty, particularly as a graduate of bachelor’s and master’s programs and law school. There’s a good meme going around about how Americans feel ashamed of poverty because they dissociate it from who they are. We are never poor, just middle-class victims of educated elites or governmental failure, depending on our politics. These kinds of stories always make me remember how much of a struggle it was to escape from depression and poverty, how hopeless it feels, how limiting is lack of money to your ability to do anything, get anywhere, literally to transport yourself anyplace. Contrast this to the liberation story of Harriet Tubman, also showing online right now, which I would recommend more easily because of its inspirational uplifting narrative. Sure there’s also a lot of hokum in it, but on the whole it’s an accurate account of what it took to become free in a system that made it legal to hold others as property. We should really be thinking deeply about that concept right now as Republican leaders are frankly fighting to uphold the lie that African-American citizens didn’t vote legally and trying to prevent them from exercising their constitutional right to vote and be represented politically in this country and in this world. The interests of all people struggling for greater equity depends on denouncing that lie.
00
At that point, what role did national radio play? Almost immediately after the peace deal was signed in August of 1993, and the U.N. force was commissioned, many of the people around the president and in the Hutu power leadership established a second radio station. Up until then, Rwanda had had one radio station, Radio Rwanda. Now they established a second major radio station with a powerful signal, called RTLM (Radio-Television Libre Milles Collines). And this became the genocidal radio. It was a radio dedicated entirely to entertainment and genocidal propaganda. And it was highly entertaining. It had pop music. It was very much in keeping with the kind of youth movement spirit of the militia movement. And people loved this radio station. It was very popular. And it mounted this increasingly virulent, exclusionary and exterminatory rhetoric in the period during the so-called peace implementation. Following the president's death, it became almost Genocide Central. It was through there that people were instructed at times, "Go out there and kill. You must do your work. People are needed over in this commune." Sometimes they actually had disc jockeys who would say, "So-and-so has just fled. He is said to be moving down such-and-such street." And they would literally hunt an individual who was targeted in the street. And people would listen to this on the radio. It was apparently quite dramatic. And it was a rallying tool that was used in a tremendous way to mobilize the population. ... To understand how powerful radio was, or how powerful the message was, it's interesting to contrast [to] neighboring Burundi, [which] has the same ethnic mix as Rwanda. The president of Burundi was a passenger on President Habyarimana's plane, and was also killed on the night of April 6th. But in that country, the U.N. leaders there helped organize the political leaders to plead on the radio for calm. So a message of calm was sent out, and people responded to that. Here, a message to lather up the population to kill was sent out, and the people responded to that. -Phillip Gourevitch on Frontline, “The Triumph of Evil”
00
A friend asked what is the one word you are using as your guidepost or guiding light for the year. Recently, mine has been transcendence. When asked to explain, I said that in phenomenology, transcendence is the narrow possibility of freedom within the context of all of the determinative facts, conditions, experiences, how and where you were born, your income, education, the abuse you experienced, everything that is a given that imposes limits. Transcendence is the possibility of going beyond them, the possibility of making a choice, taking on decisions, finding moments of liberation, instances of resistance, being free within those constraints. I would place creating another world—a world system, new set of institutions befitting our time—among those phenomena that belong to transcendence. Every so often, in the time frame of hundreds of years, changes of consciousness and concrete conditions permit a new idea for how to govern or organize ourselves economically and politically to take root, spread organically, become predominant by force of necessity or impose themselves through power, conquest, or movements of people. The strange capital riots are a reflection of that as well, however insufficient, poorly organized, and based on false information and long outmoded ideas. The nouveau régime has already passed hundreds of bills that are in part a reflection of emerging thinking—it may be the system will be reborn within the framework of the old, as the founders imagined. I don’t agree with those who say a system founded on repression cannot be reformed into one that serves justice. The tools are only limited by our capacity to think through them and adapt them for our own uses. We can also see transnational institutions and global cooperation taking on a greater urgency and importance, which may demand entirely new forms. Vive le nouveau régime!
00
Out now! “The epoch and trauma of colonial rule and slavery in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas is arguably without precedent in the long history of western imperialism and ascendancy of capitalism. Africans and its descended peoples' resistance is no less a challenge today than it was during the period of conquest, settlement, and enslavement. Indeed, the legacy of this period and those defaced by it, the continuing struggle against its repressive cultural and systemic practices in the contemporary period constitutes an abiding summons to refute the denial, by design and ignorance, of Africa's contribution to world culture and civilization. To this day, along with globalization's relentless homogenization of cultures and societies, corporate capitalism's project of accumulation sequesters and undermines humankind's capacity and will to ‘act’ in solidarity against the pillaging of the natural world that sustains life and planet Earth. In these relational historical determinations, consider the decolonizing mediation of the Pan-African Film & Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the world's most important, inclusive, and consequential cinematic convocation of its kind. Since its formation in 1969, FESPACO's mission is, in principle, remarkably unchanged, though organizationally distressed, undercapitalized, and dependent. In the long and fraught history of representation, FESPACO's defining mission is to unapologetically recover, chronicle, affirm, and reconstitute the representation of the African continent and its global diaspora of peoples, thereby enunciating in the cinematic, all manner of Pan-African identity, experience, and the futurity of the Black World in the project of world-making. With this raison d'etre in mind, the festival is to neither be mistaken for merely a site of exhibition, nor a venue for the display of African and Black artistic achievement, nor a modality for cultural performance and representation. FESPACO is a historical activity and intervention on behalf, and in the play, of culture, art, politics, modernity, and the development of nations on the African continent.” -Gaston Kabore and Michael Martin (Pt. 2 in spring)
00
Here’s another condo development I visited in Los Angeles with a lush planted facade, designed by MAD @madarchitects , the office of Beijing-based Chinese starchitect Ma Yansong, full story online at @abitare_magazine Abitare.it (link in profile). “Buildings with living walls are something of a cipher for our wish to repair the damage of human habitation on the environment. Soothing psychologically, like any facsimile of nature, we half-recognize them as a feint in practice, yet we’re irresistibly attracted to them. The Gardenhouse, on the edge of Beverly Hills bordering Los Angeles, is no different. Its two walls of plantings along the north and east facades, cropped with gabled rooftops of condos and townhomes, underline the aspirations and contradictions of expressive greenery.” Thanks editor Sara Banti! @sara.banti
00
Reading Roland Barthes’s S/Z, I’m reminded of a friend who once said it’s natural that parents often have contradictory values when it comes to their own kids, prioritizing their family and the welfare of their own children over the benefits of their decisions to the society as a whole. With genuine love toward that friend and all of my friends who have kids, I said at the time and still say, there’s nothing natural about that belief system: it’s part of a class-affiliated ideology. Here’s the quote from the S/Z preface by Richard Howard: “‘It will afford profit and pleasure to that numerous class of persons who have no instinctive enjoyment of literature,’ writes a British reviewer of the French text of S/Z. Instinctive enjoyment of literature! Surely all of Roland Barthes's ten books exist to unmask such an expression, to expose such a myth. It is precisely our ‘instinctive enjoyment' which is acculturated, determined, in bondage. Only when we know—and it is a knowledge gained by taking pains, by renouncing what Freud calls instinctual gratification—what we are doing when we read, are we free to enjoy what we read. As long as our enjoyment is—or is said to be—instinctive it is not enjoyment, it is terrorism. For literature is like love in La Rochefoucauld: no one would ever have experienced it if he had not first read about it in books. We require an education in literature as in the sentiments in order to discover that what we assumed—with the complicity of our teachers—was nature is in fact culture, that what was given is no more than a way of taking. And we must learn, when we take, the cost of our participation, or else we shall pay much more. We shall pay [in] our capacity to read at all.” In any case, our pandemic New Year involved lots of fun face-painting, transforming ourselves into Philomène’s active imaginary peopled with dinosaurs, hyper-space, talking animals, magical creatures, mysteries, as well as enjoyable math and alphabet songs and lesson books. Thanks @raphaele_shirley @michaelsarff for sharing your space and time.
00
Now out in Dwell @dwellmagazine, Jeff Day @jeffreylday of Actual Architecture Company @actual.ac , based in Omaha, Nebraska, designed this wedge-shaped house for two classical musicians in New Zealand. Or rather he designed it for his mother in Maine, it didn’t get built, and Justine Cormack found it online, purchased the drawings, and treated it like a modern score to carefully interpret in a new location, inverting it to gather light from its optimal exposures in the Southern Hemisphere. Thanks editor Camille Rankin! Beautiful new photography by Simon Devitt @simon_devitt exclusive for Dwell.
00
This is the Skinner’s Falls Bridge, the next bridge downriver from Cochecton in Milanville, where the former artist Dick Miller, a member of the Colab group in the 1970s—“I used to want to be an artist back then,” he said, when I called for permission to use a photo of his Broadway Stairwell Piece in the 597 Group’s 1975 Loft Show, which Alan Moore wrote about in Artforum at the time—told me he runs an antique store and to stop by some time. The bridge is closed right now for repair. I went to see it on my way back from the Damascus Forest, an old growth Hemlock forest suffering since the 1950s from an invasive pest, the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid. They cause crown loss and mortality by inserting a feeding tube into the base of the needles and sucking nutrients from the tree stem. They cover themselves with a white wool-looking substance and lay over 200 eggs per wool sac. Entropy in progress, yet the mosses and forms of new life living in the remnants of the old forest are bright green and appear to be thriving.
00
Happy New Year, May we survive in good health and elevate our consciousnesses, govern better, and may the best aspirations of Black Lives Matter for police and justice reform and of terrestrial creatures for global reduction in environmental and ecological habitat destruction and reduced fossil fuel energy consumption be fulfilled in 2021 and beyond. Down with the tyranny of competition and ego-centered discourses, throwaway consumption, and short-term capital-gain dominated governance. Up with care, mutual aid, and global and terrestrial consciousness.
00
I’m tempted to stand as a mute witness to the sublime wonder of nature, but for your benefit I’m excluding an image of a deer by the side of the road, mouth open, tongue swollen, slaughtered by a passing car, its guts splayed in piles on the roadway, its midsection gaping as if eviscerated by some carnivorous scavenger or a zombie. I had intended to run about five miles to Cochecten, cross the bridge, then run five miles back on River Road past the memorabilia of the Trumpist dead-ender on the Pennsylvania side. But after stopping to photograph roadkill about one-third of the way, I developed a cramp in my left calf and ended up walking maybe half of the rest. That’s probably why I didn’t cross the Cochecton Bridge until the full moon was rising in the east. Meanwhile, I was listening to the podcast “Les Chemins de la Philosophie,” in which Joëlle Zask, a lecturer in political philosophy at l'université Aix-Marseille, was talking about whether our relationship with plants influences our way of living as a society. She was referencing the shared garden, community gardens in New York City, botanical gardens, ways of life in agricultural areas, and communal living spaces (ZAD). . . are plants a sort of school for democratic life? Then, in the next episode, Florence Burgat, director of research at National Institute of Agronomic Research and co-director of the Semiannual Review of Animal Rights, talked about the limits of anthropomorphizing plants, the potential of finding instead a radical alterity in them. Plants are rapidly evolving, self-reproducing, exchanging fluidly with their milieu. Is it ill-considered to treat them as having rights and consciousness in the same way as animals and people? Or is there another rationale—such as merely the fact of their being alive—that gives rise to moral rights? An intended two-hour run turned into a three-and-half hour run-walk, but it was fairly glorious if a bit colder up here in the hills.
00
When the rains melted the snow, the river swelled up, absorbing the water that poured down hillsides, digging new crevices into the land, washing away everything that was sitting on top, branches, loose debris. Trees toppled, pulling up from their roots. Terraces and stairs down to the riverfront are half sunken under the riparian flow, and the boat landings, islands, and low-lying terrain in the floodplain disappear from view; a station for canoe vendors appears as a rooftop surrounded by muddy water. Then it freezes. Streams pouring over rocks and mossy hillsides in waterfalls form icicles, meeting the land halfway.
00
These guys at OTOV2 have an excellent huître habit during holidays so I stopped at Hong’s Seafood and brought a case of Kumamotos to Callicoon for Christmas—120 or so of them—while finishing the last section of the G.H. Hovagimyan catalogue raisonnée @hovagimyangh. Highly recommend. Merry merry, still popping bubbles and celebrating the anticipated end of this particular tyranny, with apologies to everyone struggling right now, and that includes all of us at times. #otov2 @raphaele_shirley @msarff
00
Remnants of federal style architecture on Grand Street (c. 1830s I’m guessing) and the ideals of anarchist worker-owned, built, and financed cooperative housing on the Lower East Side (c. 1930-1950) commemorated. [For the former, the landmarks commission report confirms: “Built ca. 1827-28 as an investment property by James Lent and Henry Barclay, the rowhouse at 511 Grand Street is a remarkable, rare surviving example of the Federal-style house in Manhattan. Shaped by the irregular foot print of the lot, 511 Grand Street is 291⁄2 feet wide with an extra bay on the west side. Although the façade has been altered, the building still retains significant elements of its original Federal style such as its original 21⁄2-story height, peaked roof, pedimented dormers and brick chimney and side entrance. Located on Grand Street, a busy thoroughfare, a succession of tenants since the 1840s has used 511 Grand Street as home and place of business. The survival of 511 Grand Street and its neighbor 513 Grand Street in an area heavily altered in the nineteenth century to accommodate the increasing population of the Lower East Side and in the twentieth century by urban renewal is significant to the understanding of the development of the area.”]
00
Laurie Anderson @laurieandersonofficial did this sound event on Sunday in cooperation with the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies @barrecenter to mark the solstice eve, and it’s worth listening to for enjoyment, meditation, and spiritual elevation. I’ll put a link in the profile. https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/recordings/events/
00
This actually dates from the post-election series of champagne bottles, this one popped on the occasion of the Djordjevic’s Eastern Orthodox family saint’s day, but I’m repurposing it here for the solstice. Cheers to the increasing sunlight and stay safe out there this winter.
00
In search of things to celebrate this year, I hereby give you some mansard roofs, appointed Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, ginger beer, the coming end of this despotic government, and the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas across great distances regularly with wonderful, brilliant, funny people. Happy holidays from Brooklyn.