Thank you, Mr B

Photo: DH

Cornerstone

Photo: DH

Hello, Little Man

Photo: DH
I am in love.
Universal Café, San Francisco
http://www.universalcafe.net/universalcafe.html

Robert Adams

Colorado, 1972

Williamsburg, Virginia

Photo: Stephanie Oberlander for The New York Times

Washington, DC

Andrew Sullivan on last night's press conference:

Obama...noticeably avoided the MSM hierarchy. He gets the mood. And seriously: he's obviously up to the job. That was as competent a presser as I've seen in my years covering politics, and light years better than his predecessor's.

Obama is a president who is eager to lay it all out. He understands that the elites - who are used to thinking ideologically - will be the hardest audience. But if he can talk directly, pragmatically, specifically to average Americans, he thinks he can talk them round. His confidence in this is a little breath-taking. And yet, when you see him in action, it seems foolish to underestimate him.

I said it in the campaign and I'll say it again. He has flaws; he deserves pushback; he needs criticism. But we're lucky to have him right now, in my fallible judgment. Extremely lucky.

http://tiny.cc/DcOqp

White House to ISS

Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times
NYTimes:

President Barack Obama, joined by Washington-area middle school students and members of Congress, held a video conference call with astronauts from the space station and from the shuttle Discovery in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.“We’ve got a crew of wonderful schoolchildren here, who are all interested in space, and we’ve got some members of Congress, who are like big kids when it comes to talking to astronauts,” President Obama said, according to a transcript from the White House.

Patrick Caulfield

Tate Modern; London
"After Lunch"

Brainwires

David Shattuck/Arthur Toga/Paul Thompson/UCLA

The smarter the person, the faster information zips around the brain, a UCLA study finds. And this ability to think quickly apparently is inherited. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, looked at the brains and intelligence of 92 people. All the participants took standard IQ tests. Then the researchers studied their brains using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging, or DTI.

DTI is a variant of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that can measure the structural integrity of the brain's white matter, which is made up of cells that carry nerve impulses from one part of the brain to another. The greater the structural integrity, the faster nerve impulses travel.

"These images really give you a picture of the mental speed of the brain," says Paul Thompson, Ph.D., a professor of neurology at UCLA School of Medicine.

This colorful brain image is like a map of mental speed. The bright spaghetti structures represent the pathways connecting different brain cells. Thompson says not only are these brain scans beautiful but "these images really give you a picture of the mental speed of the brain."

NPR: http://tiny.cc/BpOYP

Big Love

Photo: Lacey Terrell / HBO

Hollywood: Groundwork

Photo: DH

Photo: Ruby Washington/The New York Times

"Abraham Lincoln in New York," at Federal Hall in Manhattan runs through the end of June and was assembled largely from private collections. Exhibits for Lincoln celebrating the bicentennial year of his birth have sprouted all over the United States. Among the artifacts at Federal Hall is a campaign poster from 1864 that played the race card.

East London

Kenny Baker, १९६८
A drawing gives an overhead view of Robin Hood Gardens

Nicholas Ouroussoff

The most polarizing issue in architecture today is no longer whether celebrity architects are ruining the profession. It’s what to do with the leftovers of postwar Brutalism.

Central to the debate is the future of Robin Hood Gardens, a sprawling East London housing complex designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in the 1960s and built in the early ’70s. Preservationists hold it up as a signal cultural achievement; the British government has judged it a failure and wants to demolish it. As is so often the case, insights emerge from the sparks that fly when two opposing ideologies clash.

For an older generation of architects these buildings embody the absolute nadir of the welfare state। Destroying them would be an act of mercy. But for younger architects the aggressive concrete forms that gave the movement its name are a welcome antidote to the saccharine Disney-inspired structures of today. Their demolition amounts to urban shock treatment, an erasure of historical memory that substitutes a sanitized city for a genuinely complex one.

---

Still, you do not have to be a hard-core Modernist to notice a higher form of architectural intelligence at work here। All you need is to suspend your aesthetic prejudices. The tough exterior, as it turns out, protects an inner sanctuary: a large courtyard centered on a big mound of grass. And the mound itself is a gorgeous, haunted space. It evokes both a primitive burial mound and traditional Georgian gardens.The buildings framing it on either side are slightly bent, as if the space was being held between two cupped hands. One is several stories lower than the other to allow in southern light.

There are also wonderful details to be found above if you know to look for them। The walkways’ rails are fitted with glass panels to allow more light into the apartments. Doors are set perpendicular to the walkways to provide an element of privacy. The duplex apartments themselves are laid out according to a complex system developed by the Russian Constructivist Moisei Ginzburg and popularized by Le Corbusier, with entries set on alternate levels so that each apartment has an entire floor with windows on both sides.Elements like these may not justify a meticulous restoration, but they certainly suggest that they can be transformed into humane, even exhilarating, housing without completely stripping them of their soul ।

---

But a more meaningful approach would be to allow an imaginative architect to tackle the entire complex। Introducing a tension between new and old is only likely to make the Smithsons’ design more poignant.The advantage to this strategy is partly environmental. Construction is one of the largest single producers of carbon dioxide. In the age of global warming, deciding to tear down and rebuild rather than think through whether a project can be salvaged has obvious ethical implications.

Yet an equally important issue is how we treat the cities we inherit and the memories they hold. Condemning an entire historical movement can be a symptom of intellectual laziness. It can also be a way to avoid difficult truths.

Architecture attains much of its power from the emotional exchanges among an architect, a client, a site and the object itself. A spirited renovation of Robin Hood Gardens would be a chance to extend that discourse across generations.

Switzerland

Christoph Bangert for The New York Times
NYTimes: A growing number of unclad hikers are wandering the Alps, near Appenzell. Some Swiss legal experts say that banning nudity in public would be unconstitutional.

Broadway

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
NYTimes: Vivacious summoner: Angela Lansbury, seated, with, from left, Jayne Atkinson, Christine Ebersole, and Rupert Everett in Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”
The Shubert Theater.

Manhattan

Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
NYTimes: The Pool Room at the Four Seasons on East 52nd Street. The room was designed by the architects Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe.

Félix Fénéon

"Faits divers"

Share

Photo: DH
Send what you can to the animal rescue services. Please.
Humans aren't the only beings affected by the downturn.
http://helpacc.org/donate_new.html
http://www.sacloaves.org
http://animalcare.lacounty.gov/About%20ACF.asp

Secret Revealed

Smithsonian Institution/Associated Press

Abraham Lincoln’s gold pocket watch, which contains a message secretly engraved by a watchmaker.
NYTimes:

“Jonathan Dillon April 13- 1861 Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels on the above date. J Dillon,” the brass underside of the watch movement reads. The inscription continues: “April 13- 1861 Washington thank God we have a government Jonth Dillon.”

The story of the engraving had been passed down through the years by descendants of Jonathan Dillon, the watchmaker, without ever being verified. Then recently one of his great-great-grandsons, Douglas Stiles, a lawyer from Waukegan, Ill., discovered an April 1906 article in The New York Times in which Mr. Dillon described making the engraving. In the article Mr. Dillon, then 84, recounted that he was working at M. W. Galt & Company, a watch shop on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, in April 1861 when the shop’s owner, Mr. Galt, hurried upstairs to tell him, “War has begun; the first shot has been fired.”

“At that moment I had in my hand Abraham Lincoln’s watch, which I had been repairing,” Dillon told The Times, adding that he later learned it was the first watch that Lincoln ever owned. An immigrant from Waterford, Ireland, he told The Times, “I was the only Union sympathizer working in the shop.”

No Strings

Walt Disney's second full-length animated feature: "Pinocchio" (1940)
Released today in Blu-ray and DVD
NYTimes:

Loosely based on a 19th-century children’s novel by Carlo Collodi, [Disney's] “Pinocchio” remains a technical summit of hand-drawn animation, executed with a grace and expressiveness of movement that even Disney’s artists were never quite able to recapture. On one level it is about the wonder of its own existence: the little wooden boy who comes to life is a metaphor for Disney’s process of creation, turning ink and paint into three-dimensional creatures that seem to breathe with a force of their own.

Set in a sort of anti-Disneyland theme park, in which the principal activities are smoking, drinking and fighting, the Pleasure Island sequence buzzes with a wealth of Freudian detail. Here the Disney film seems influenced by the Fleischer [brothers], suggesting the dark view of burgeoning sexuality portrayed in the brothers’ shorts like “Bimbo’s Initiation” (1931) and the Betty Boop version of “Snow-White” (1933).

Kangol

Autoportrait
The hat.

San Francisco

Photo: CMBradshaw
The Little Man of the North Country.

Hollywood

Converse

Chuck Taylor All-Star Specialty Hi

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“There is no old Europe, no new Europe, there is only your friend Europe. So once again I say we should seize the moment — because never before have I seen a world so willing to come together. Never before has that been more needed. And never before have the benefits of cooperation been so far-reaching.”

Jim Isermann

Photo: Brian Wilson
Sherrerd Hall installation
Princeton University

Accountability

New York Times
More Terror Memos to be Released
WASHINGTON — One day after releasing a set of Bush administration memorandums claiming sweeping presidential powers to bypass legal constraints when fighting terrorism, Justice Department officials said on Tuesday that they may soon disclose further secret opinions about interrogation, surveillance, and other national security policies.

“These memos appear to have given the Bush administration a legal blank check to trample on Americans’ civil rights,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island. Referring to the Office of Legal Counsel, the section of the Justice Department where Mr. Yoo worked, Mr. Whitehouse said, “We need to get to the bottom of what happened at O.L.C. and ensure it never happens again.”

Other critics of the Bush administration insist that a criminal investigation is crucial for restoring the rule of law.

One of them, Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, pointed to language in one of the memos released on Monday that said that the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution were trumped by the president’s power as commander-in-chief, saying it was even more alarming than critics had imagined.

“This was an assault on the law itself,” Mr. Ratner said. “It’s as if 200 years of our history and the Constitution could just be dispensed with in the face of a terrorist attack. For me, it totally intensified the absolute need for a serious criminal investigation of both the authors of these memos as well as the people who put them up to it.”

Demeyer

Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
The 9.4 inch Proline frying pan.

Denver, Colorado

Photo: Ed Andrieski/Associated Press
NYTimes: “Blue Mustang,” a sculpture at Denver International Airport, by Luis Jiménez (killed in 2006 when a section of the 9,000-pound fiberglass statue fell on him during construction).

Illustrator: Brian Stauffer

Apropos

In re: Rightwing radiohead elicits apology from RNC Chairman Michael Steele
H. L. Mencken said of William Jennings Bryant:

He was born with a roaring voice that had the trick of inflaming half-wits.