freezing to death in the nuclear bunker

2006-07-13T01:54:00.000-07:00

I'll be over here for the next little while.

2006-05-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

Either I never knew that New York Air existed or I completely forgot about it, but I was psyched to find this long lost souvenir of my hometown's sort-of-recent past on AirlineMeals.net:

Photo Taken by: J Zeltzer, early 1980's
Flying From: LGA-BOS, LGA-DCA
Aircraft: DC-9-30
Comments: "The Flying Nosh, originally a nylon bag replaced later by paper, contained a bagel, a container of Philly Cream Cheese, Napkin and knife. All 110 passengers on the shuttle flights got this and a beverage on flights that were as short as 30 minutes on the east coast shuttle.
New York Air was set up by Texas Air Corporation (Frank Lorenzo) as a non-union carrier to compete with the Eastern Shuttle and was later merged with Continental Airlines."

Some New York Air timetables, via AirTimes.com:

2006-05-05T21:53:00.000-07:00

A large share of the attention being paid to the nu-urbanism of Mayor Villaraigosa's Los Angeles is on the downtown development frenzy -- luxury residential skyscrapers, Gehry-overseen retail and entertainment meccas, etc. I understand how PR works and that every massive undertaking needs a big, marketable idea to hang its hat on, so as long as what's happening doesn't displace any of the current residents (whoever they may be) or shop owners, and the homeless are treated fairly, I'll withhold judgment for now. With gritted teeth.

However, the real urbanism in Southern California seems to be happening more quietly but with wider dispersal and on a smaller scale -- in well-designed, often affordable low- and mid-rise housing developments situated in already existing neighborhoods. The LA Times has the story...

First sprouts of a vertical cityscape
L.A.'s top architects turn their eye to three- and four-story complexes that could provide a creative answer to the mayor's call for more housing.

By Janet Eastman, Times Staff Writer

ARCHITECT Lorcan O'Herlihy's custom touches were exactly what Sara Beugen and Stephen Mabry wanted in their new home — a light-filled, industrial modern in West Hollywood with polished concrete floors and open-to-the-sky steel catwalks crossing the upper levels of the condominium complex.

Over in South Pasadena, two other architects, Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides, created a private retreat and communal experience for Juan Posada, whose second-floor loft has soaring ceilings and a terrace overlooking a courtyard where he and his neighbors barbecue.

Yet none of the architects worked directly for, or even with, these residents. O'Herlihy, Moule and Polyzoides adhered to the principle that sharp design could entice people into a compact vertical lifestyle. They, along with other progressive local architects, see enormous creative opportunities in multifamily housing of fewer than 50 units on an acre.

And the timing couldn't be better. The designs, which are more about good use of space and light rather than square footage, could help coax Angelenos out of single-family homes and a horizontal way of life.

Adding new homes — a few dozen small ones at a time — to existing neighborhoods is part of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plan to relieve L.A.'s housing shortage. If the new dwellings are close to public transit, all the better. If they rid the neighborhood of an eyesore, longtime residents win too.

Villaraigosa's newly appointed city planner S. Gail Goldberg, who is credited with helping San Diego turn around its downtown with multiunit housing, believes well-situated three- and four-story buildings, not monolithic high-rise towers, are the way to re-energize communities. San Diego's approach to density was to create a city of villages. For Los Angeles' boulevards, Goldberg sees shops, restaurants and people-watching spots. Down the side streets, houses. Filling in between the existing shops and houses, multifamily designer dream pads.

Even critics of the mayor's call for higher density see this as a better way to grow.

"I don't think there is a desire for massive density but a low- and midrise strategy makes a lot of sense," says Joel Kotkin, an urban commentator and author of "The City: A Global History." He often disagrees with Los Angeles politicians, developers and others who "get on density jihads." That includes the mayor, he says.

If built in an underutilized area or if replacing "a crappy strip mall," however, a small condo development is not a high price to pay for a better district, says Kotkin, a longtime house owner in Valley Village. "This is particularly attractive if it brings in stores and other amenities that are in walking distance of single-family homes."

With less open space for traditional single-family homes, housing experts say that a portion of new development will be devoted to urban, mid-size projects especially in existing neighborhoods. Good design, architects and developers say, can make a big difference in attracting residents doubtful about sharing walls with their neighbors.

"There is a new language in housing, a new market for those who want to live in urban areas and who have an appreciation of design," says O'Herlihy, whose Culver City architectural firm shifted from sleek contemporary houses with ocean or hillside views to multifamily projects two years ago. His first project was the condo complex in West Hollywood that Beugen and Mabry moved into in January; the 10 units there sold out before construction was completed. He now has nine mid-size projects under development or construction in Los Angeles. "Our previous residential work was a lab for these new projects."

Many of the new dwellings are 21st century twists on the classic 1920s courtyard apartments designed by Irving Gill, Richard Neutra and others who artfully interpreted living in close-quarters. Besides creating a sun-filtering, roomy and indoor-outdoor ambience, many of the new designs offer custom floor plans, private terraces, generous storage areas and designer touches such as translucent channel glass and stone shower stalls.

And unlike high-rises and economical apartment buildings of the 1960s and '70s, in which budgets and construction restraints dictated look-alike floor plans and tunnel-like hallways, these new mid-rise buildings are designed not only for looks but also for getting people out of cars — "feet on the street," as city planner Goldberg puts it.

"We fell in love with this place," says Posada, 36, a photographer who lives in his one-bedroom loft in South Pasadena with his wife Sally McKissick, 39, and their 10-month-old daughter, Maria. They wanted to buy a house with a yard but sticker shock brought them to this rental near the Gold Line's Mission Station.

Although the three-story, brick-clad, Mission-style structure looks like the century-old building next to it, generous windows wash his rooms in sunlight. "There is lots of light, and it feels big with 18-foot ceilings," Posada says.

Where he and his family live used to be a parking lot. Now parking is underground for the block-long redevelopment, a mix of ground-floor shops with courtyards, lofts, Craftsman-style duplexes and single-family houses designed to blend with the 1920s single-family bungalows across the street.

The courtyard approach is appearing in high-end and subsidized mid-size housing. For the Crescent in Beverly Hills, where monthly rents are as high at $7,000, architect Johannes Van Tilburg designed the apartments to face a courtyard, while brownstone-style town houses front the street. Brian Lane's award-winning contemporary apartments on Harold Way in Hollywood where rents don't exceed $700, is built around two courtyards where streamlined stairways almost resemble sculptural installations.

Beugen and Mabry's high-design condo is across the street from an auto shop and stucco apartment building — what architect O'Herlihy refers to as "six pack," repetitive units stacked on top of each other. An orderly line of single-family houses fills out the rest of the block, with stores and restaurants around the corner.

Beugen, 32, a marketing and communications professional at Cresta West, says her new neighbors are as design demanding as she and Mabry. "We had an informal talk here about everyone using a similar window treatment," says Beugen, who grew up in Chicago next door to architect Walter Netsch in a contemporary house her father built. "We took a deep breath when we saw that no one hung big drapes, but simple off-white museum shades."

With so many restaurants so close, the couple is surprised that since they moved here they have enjoyed more meals at home. "There is more room in the kitchen than in our old place," says Mabry, 45, an actor and photographer, "and we like to eat on our patio. We have two chefs who live in the building, one, Albert Melera, is a private chef for celebrities, and they come by and ask, 'What's for dinner?' "

HAROLD WAY: Private but public housing

"THERE are no hidden corners here," says Brian Lane, left, of Koning Eizenberg Architecture in Santa Monica. He wrestled with a tight budget, ignored the pitfall of designing bland affordable housing and found ways to make 51 apartments near a busy intersection off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood feel safe and private.

As a built-in safety measure, the four-story buildings line up around two interior courtyards. "All units are accessed from exterior walkways so neighbors can see the activities," says Lane, near one of the open stairways that make it easy to watch comings and goings. Even the community laundry room in this stylish gated complex has windows to the courtyard and playground.

For privacy, entrances to most of the three-bedroom town houses and one- and two-bedroom apartments are set back 3 feet from public walkways to create a porch-like setting. Apartments have their own decks, patios or balconies. Trees and bamboo are strategically placed to screen views for privacy. Bedroom windows are tucked away from areas where people congregate.

Subsidized rents for the 500- to 1,200-square-foot apartments go for $350 to $700. The complex built for the Hollywood Community Housing Corp. received Residential Architect magazine's affordable housing merit award in 2004.

Future project: Hancock Corner in West Hollywood with stores and restaurants, 38 condos and affordable apartments.

— J.E.

*

MISSION MERIDIAN: Going for the Gold Line

"ALOT of people fear density because there are a lot of terrible, overly dense projects in Los Angeles," says Elizabeth Moule of Pasadena-based Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists. "Making slightly denser places around transit lines is a way to accommodate the growth to L.A. that also preserves single-family houses and yards."

When Michael Dieden of Creative Housing Associates of Los Angeles asked Moule and husband Stefanos Polyzoides to create housing and shops on a block near a Metro Gold Line stop in South Pasadena, the duo came up with a series of buildings with different heights and façades, right, to blend into the Mission Street neighborhood. "We wouldn't put a high-rise on a street like that," says Moule.

A brick-clad, three-story nearest the busy street has small shops on the ground level — a bakery, florist, spinning gym and a gift store; none is a chain store.

Above them are 14 lofts that make the most of their 845- to 1,120-square-footage with a minimum of interior walls and two-story-high windows. Two levels of parking underneath the building accommodate residents' and train riders' cars.

Next to the flat-roof brick building are four duplexes built in the Craftsman style. These green-shingled buildings with pitched roofs begin to blend — in height and façade — with the new housing with the street's original single-family houses.

Adjacent to the duplexes, at the end of the new development, are three 2,400-square-foot single-family bungalows that fit in with the 80-year-old ones across the wide street.

To encourage occupants to people-watch, architects designed porches and large windows. "People like urbanity and being with one another," says Moule, who co-founded with Polyzoides and others the Congress for the New Urbanism, a national association of architects, planners and environmentalists focused on improving suburbs and urban centers.

Three courtyards in the center of the buildings also create a sense of community, Moule says. Residents pass through courtyards to reach their front doors. One night last year, the electricity went out and neighbors took their dinner plates and candles to the courtyards and ate together.

There are no security gates to block the courtyards from the sidewalk, a decision the architects made so neighbors can have a more positive experience when strolling by.

The 67 homes were completed in June and sold during construction for $350,000 to $850,000. The development received a Tranny Award from the California Transportation Foundation, and it will be featured in the Urban Land Institute's annual book on outstanding housing projects.

Future project: Granada Court in Old Town Pasadena with 31 flats and town houses, private balconies, decks or patios, two internal pedestrian courts and an auto court.

— Janet Eastman

*

THE CRESCENT: It's valet all the way

"THIS is all about livable cities with the focus on the street, actually the sidewalk," says Johannes Van Tilburg, above, of Santa Monica-based Van Tilburg, Banvard & Soderbergh, whose new complex is the first apartment building constructed in Beverly Hills in 25 years.

In 2001, the architect looked at a parking lot with a chain-link fence and a worn commercial building on Crescent Drive. Van Tilburg knew he could upgrade this area near the famous Rodeo Drive with a new type of luxury housing.

"Small lawns in front of live-work town houses and garden apartments on top is a very European and urban lifestyle," says Van Tilburg, who worked with Los Angeles developer J.H. Snyder Co.

Residents and their guests can enter the property through the motor court, hand their keys to the valet, pass the concierge in the atrium lobby and enter into one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, which rent for $4,000 to $7,000.

The 12 two-story town houses that front the street have the silhouettes of traditional brownstones but with a California contemporary twist. They have bay windows, Juliet balconies, stoop entries, awnings and private gardens.

Exterior walls have alternating sand-colored plaster and red-brick veneer to create the look of a streetscape that has evolved over time.

The town houses hide parking from street view, and there's also subterranean spaces.

Overlooking a landscaped courtyard at the 1.7-acre site is a building that houses 76 apartments. Amenities in the 815- to 1,810-square-foot spaces include stone-finished showers, stainless steel appliances and walnut-stained cabinets.

Future project: Granite Park in Pasadena with 71 live-work town homes and flats sited around courtyards and an auto court.

— J.E.

*

GARDNER STREET: Lighten up

"LIGHT is an architectural material, equally important as others," says Lorcan O'Herlihy of Culver City-based Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects, who designed a tight, but sun-catching cube of 10 contemporary condominiums on a side street off Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.

The 1,300- to 1,700-square-foot condos are built around a U-shaped central courtyard. Four units are on the first and second levels and two penthouses on the third level. Each has windows or doors on three sides with views of the sky; a courtyard water sculpture, below; and, because this is an urban setting, alleys and nearby buildings.

To capture as much sunlight as possible, O'Herlihy used light-filtering materials. Steel catwalks that connect front doors on the levels above the courtyard are perforated to allow streams of sunlight into the complex and into the homes.

Translucent walls of industrial Profilit Channel Glass encase the vertical stairwell at the front of the building.

At night, the lighted stairwell looks like a lantern. Next to it, a cedar entrance gate veils residents from passersby on the sidewalk, but inch gaps between the slats illuminate the courtyard.

The condos, which were developed by Richard Loring of Habitat Group Los Angeles, sold on average for $670,000 before construction was completed in December.

Future project: A 19-unit building adjacent to the Schindler House, now the MAK Center, on Kings Road in West Hollywood will have a courtyard, pedestrian-inviting setback with benches and light wells on the top of the three levels that open up to the sky and bring light into each unit.

— J.E.

via Curbed LA

2006-05-02T09:03:00.000-07:00

2006-04-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

This is breathtaking: Liza Minnelli in 1987, letting the press sit in on a rehearsal of "I Happen to Like New York" at Carnegie Hall. One of Liza's last great hurrahs before descending into irreparable freakitude. (I'm glad she got to do the Pet Shop Boys album before that happened.)

2006-04-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

Dictionary.com word of the day, according to Gmail: rebarbative: repellent; irritating.

2006-04-26T01:14:00.000-07:00

By now you've all heard that theorist and civic activist Jane Jacobs has passed away at the age of 89. She was an amazing woman: brazen, outspoken, but with a pragmatism that belied her passion. This pragmatism came partially from her grounding in small-scale economics, from also her love of people and her going to bat for the different kinds of people that live in a city -- including night and weekend workers, younger people who don't own homes and aren't raising families, transient types who prefer or need to rent, those for whom property value is not the be-all-and-end-all of human existence, but who are typically capable of making their money talk just like anyone else. "THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN"-style arguments don't hold much water with me, because they never account for everyone who doesn't have a voice, and they don't particularly want to account for them. We need more thinkers like Jacobs.

I'm not a Reason fan and I think their views are too often as simplistic as they accuse the hippie idealists of being -- basically they're just overgrown babies going "waah rules are bad, why can't we do WHATEVER WE WANT." That said, this 2001 interview with Jane Jacobs makes more sense than anything I've read in Reason, and the interviewer actually acknowledges the practicality of Jacobs' ideas and helps make her case more attractive to the conservative readership. It would be easy for a libertarian to co-opt Jacobs' fervent anti-government principles, although I wonder if conservatives understand that the type of government that she was against is the same type they vote for in every election. Pure government (as a benevolent entity looking out for the public interest) is a very good thing and can be extremely effective on the local level; a "free market" government that lets the rich people call the shots is something else entirely.

(I still think Jacobs took an antiquated view of the planning profession -- it's more forward-thinking now than it used to be, and it's less about playing God than about analyzing what is already happening and will be happening if the data forecasts prove correct.) (I also think zoning -- which she hated -- can be useful in some cases, but it needs to be open to change and public debate. I personally believe that the future of cities is in mixed-use development, adaptive reuse rather than reckless bulldozing, and tax incentives for small businesses in residential areas.)

2006-04-24T22:32:00.000-07:00

I don't really spend as much time as I should trawling YouTube, but clips like the ones I found tonight make me want to change that. If you were in New York in the late '70s, you might remember a couple of our local TV stations, WOR (Channel 9) and WPIX (Channel 11, a/k/a "11 Alive!"), from before they got bought out by big superstation networks. Here's a bit of footage from those halcyon days. Keep your eye out for John Tesh in the CBS spot.

WOR-TV Channel 9 "Million Dollar Movie" opening credits 70s

WCBS Channel 2 News Promo--1970s

WPIX Giants vs. Steelers promo 1979

WPIX 8 O'Clock Movie close 1978

WPIX 11 New York Action News Opening 1979

2006-04-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to plan in New York? It means accounting for demographic and economic shifts of the past few decades, working with a metropolitan area with such a wide variety of backgrounds and political viewpoints that it's impossible to accommodate everyone, and coming to terms with the realization that the self-styled center of the universe may not be the best model of smart growth and community-conscious planning. Regional Plan Association director Robert Yaro discusses this in light of a population explosion that continues to test the limits of NYC's existing infrastructure and shortage of available land.

2006-04-13T23:24:00.000-07:00

Urban history/exploration/preservation site du jour: Curating the City: Wilshire Blvd., part of an ongoing (and similarly named) project by the Los Angeles Conservancy. The site is a photo essay, an annotated geography, an architectural tour, and an interactive Memory Book. And it tells you which buses stop at each intersection!

2006-04-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

This New York cover -- between the color scheme and typography and whimsical jetset cosmopolitanism -- is a perfect distillation of 1964 magazine/movie poster design. Pea green and ketchup red together forever.

2006-04-06T11:26:00.000-07:00

I'm taking off tonight for Los Angeles -- there's a welcome event/scholarship reception thing tomorrow at the program I'm starting in the fall. I'm very much looking forward to spending the rest of the weekend visiting friends, record shopping, restaurant-hopping, taking pictures, and navigating L.A.'s complex bus system. And, since my hotel's not far from the beach, maybe I can get a little of that in as well.

I'll be flying into LAX on Song (Delta's low-cost carrier), which will be interesting. I've never flown with them before and they'll be discontinuing their service at the end of the month, when the current fleet will get a new coat of paint and get reabsorbed back into Delta proper, with all of the amenities but minus the lime green and orange color scheme and singing stewardesses. (I'll learn soon enough whether Song is a Chuck E. Cheese in the sky for yuppies, but my guess is that it's fine, and preferable to the soul-sucking Gulag-like atmosphere of other airlines.)

2006-03-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

Losanjealous posted A Trader Joe's Primer For Manhattanites back in January, but now that the Union Square location has actually opened, this guide may prove useful to those crazy enough to brave the long lines. I've been past the new TJ's twice now and both times, there were people lined up halfway down the block to get in (past the Palladium/NYU dorms and that gross pizzeria). Is it really that busy inside the store or is this just one of those wacky '90s-style PR moves?

Anyway, while I haven't been to this new one yet, I'm a TJ's veteran (going back to when I moved to Oregon in 1999, and afterwards when I realized that there were locations on Long Island and in New Jersey). I recommend the sunflower seed butter, the chocolate-dipped frozen bananas, the roasted vegetable pizza, the frozen naan (garlic or plain), the frozen 3-minute jasmine rice, the fresh pappardelle, the artisanal cranberry rolls, the rice pudding, the Greek yogurt... there's lots of good stuff. Stay away from the frozen burritos though; they don't quite cook right and end up a consistency that's too chewy on the outside and booger-like on the inside.

2006-03-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

Flickr find of the week: a set of 151 photos taken at the 1967 Montreal Expo. User ninecormorants explains:

These photos were found on the street in Cambridge, MA - October 2004. They were originally arranged on scrapbook sheets with labels. I've attempted to arrange them in a sensible order, but this is the best I could do.

If I ever found anything like that on the street, I think I'd explode with joy. Dude, thank you so much for recognizing the historical worth of this scrapbook and taking the time to scan and upload each picture.

2006-03-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

Time to brag: This morning I got a nice thick envelope telling me I was admitted to USC's Master of Planning program! That makes three admissions so far out of seven applications! The rest will be gravy.

2006-02-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

Duly noted: Nerve's Sex Advice From Urban Planners. (Psst... there are twenty-seven principles.)

Valerie, 26

How can becoming an urban planner help me get laid?
Urban planning opens the door to the exciting male-dominated world of architects, builders and engineers. Merge those parcels. And for men, saying you're an urban planner is at least cooler than being an accountant.

How can I get an urban planner to go home with me?
Talk shit about Wal-Mart, brag about your frequent public-transport ridership and drop phrases like "spatial morphology."

How can I delay my orgasm, besides going slow and taking breaks?
Recite the twenty-one principles of New Urbanism in your head over and over again.

2006-02-22T13:13:00.000-07:00

Thousands Of Law Applicants Get Mistaken Admissions Invite

BERKELEY, Calif. -- An Iowa father said his son was "ecstatic" when he got an e-mail invitation to a party for students accepted to U.C. Berkeley's law school.

Unfortunately, Adam Feeney was among thousands of applicants who hadn't been accepted to the prestigious California school and were sent invitations by accident. A little later they received apologies and retractions.

His father said Feeney "was obviously upset and disappointed."

Boalt Hall School of Law's admissions director says the e-mailed invite begins "I write to congratulate you once more on your recent admission to Boalt Law."

The admissions official said the invitation was intended for about 500 students who were accepted early.

Instead, he inadvertantly sent it to about 7,000 applicants.

2006-02-17T10:46:00.000-07:00

I just subscribed to BusinessWeek and I think it's a total riot. Here's a blurb (from the UpFront section) that doesn't seem to be in the online edition...

AS THE CALL CENTER TURNS

MAYBE IT SEEMS like you spend half your life on the phone with a call center in India. But in India itself, call centers actually are seeping into everyday life, appearing in a wave of popular sitcoms and books. India Calling, a hot Indian TV show on Rupert Murdoch's STAR channel, depicts a small-town girl who lands in Bombay in search of her absconding sister. She finds a job in a call center instead. Viewers follow the highs and lows of the work, which attracts thousands of young Indians. "Call center jobs are now part of India's social fabric, offering immense scope for romance, politics, hatred, all creating high drama," says Shristi Behl Arya, who is the show's producer.

Indeed, the customer service scene in India is anything but boring. Centers can be a hotbed of hormones; some average a marriage a month, often outside traditional bounds of caste and economic status. The Call Center, a show coming soon to channel NDTV, takes potshots at Americans venting their angst about losing their jobs to the Indians on the other end of the wire. A best-selling book, One Night @ The Call Center, touches on love, bad bosses, even God (appearing, naturally, in a phone call). Then there are the jokes making the rounds: When a man complains to a doctor about insomnia, the doctor suggests working at a call center as the remedy.

-Nandini Lakshman

2006-02-11T23:27:00.000-07:00

Aww... the Torino mascot pins are SO CUTE:

More on mascots Neve and Gliz here.

2006-02-09T13:03:00.000-07:00

French chefs in relinquishing their Michelin stars le shocker!

2006-02-07T08:33:00.000-07:00

In Sunday's L.A. Times, Ray Bradbury makes the case for the monorail:

L.A.'s future is up in the air
By Ray Bradbury, RAY BRADBURY is the author of "The Martian Chronicles," "Fahrenheit 451" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes," among other books.

SOMETIME IN THE next five years, traffic all across L.A. will freeze.

The freeways that were once a fast-moving way to get from one part of the city to another will become part of a slow-moving glacier, edging down the hills to nowhere.

In recent years we've all experienced the beginnings of this. A trip from the Valley into Los Angeles that used to take half an hour — all of a sudden it takes an hour or two or three. Our warning system tells us something must be done before our freeways trap us in the outlying districts, unable to get to our jobs.

In recent months there has been talk of yet another subway, one that would run between downtown L.A. and Santa Monica. That would be a disaster.

A single transit line will not answer our problems; we must lay plans for a series of transportation systems that would allow us to move freely, once more, within our city.

The answer to all this is the monorail. Let me explain.

More than 40 years ago, in 1963, I attended a meeting of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors at which the Alweg Monorail company outlined a plan to construct one or more monorails crossing L.A. north, south, east and west. The company said that if it were allowed to build the system, it would give the monorails to us for free — absolutely gratis. The company would operate the system and collect the fare revenues.

It seemed a reasonable bargain to me. But at the end of a long day of discussion, the Board of Supervisors rejected Alweg Monorail.

I was stunned. I dimly saw, even at that time, the future of freeways, which would, in the end, go nowhere.

At the end of the afternoon, I asked for three minutes to testify. I took the microphone and said, "To paraphrase Winston Churchill, rarely have so many owed so little to so few." I was conducted out of the meeting.

In a panic at what I saw as a disaster, I offered my services to the Alweg Monorail people for the next year.

During the following 12 months I lectured in almost every major area of L.A., at open forums and libraries, to tell people about the promise of the monorail. But at the end of that year nothing was done.

Forty years have passed, and more than ever we need an open discussion of our future. If we examine the history of subways, we will find how tremendously expensive and destructive they are.

They are, first of all, meant for cold climates such as Toronto, New York, London, Paris, Moscow and Tokyo. But L.A. is a Mediterranean area; our weather is sublime, and people are accustomed to traveling in the open air and enjoying the sunshine, not in closed cars under the ground.

Subways take forever to build and, because the tunnels have to be excavated, are incredibly expensive. The cost of one subway line would build 10 monorail systems.

Along the way, subway construction destroys businesses by the scores. The history of the subway from East L.A. to the Valley is a history of ruined businesses and upended lives.

The monorail is extraordinary in that it can be built elsewhere and then carried in and installed in mid-street with little confusion and no destruction of businesses. In a matter of a few months, a line could be built from Long Beach all the way along Western Avenue to the mountains with little disturbance to citizens and no threat to local businesses.

Compared to the heavy elevateds of the past, the monorail is virtually soundless. Anyone who has ridden the Disneyland or Seattle monorails knows how quietly they move.

They also have been virtually accident-free. The history of the monorail shows few collisions or fatalities.If we constructed monorails running north and south on Vermont, Western, Crenshaw and Broadway, and similar lines running east and west on Washington, Pico, Wilshire, Santa Monica and Sunset, we would have provided a proper cross section of transportation, allowing people to move anywhere in our city at any time.

There you have it. As soon as possible, we must call in one of the world's monorail-building companies to see what could be done so that the first ones could be in position by the end of the year to help our huddled traffic masses yearning to travel freely.

The freeway is the past, the monorail is our future, above and beyond.

Let the debate begin.

2006-01-30T00:30:00.000-07:00

Hey, did you know there's a border dispute between New Jersey and Delaware? Here's how that's going...

DOVER, Del. -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday granted a request by Delaware to appoint a special master in a border dispute with New Jersey, dashing the Garden State's hopes for a quick resolution of the case.

The high court appointed attorney Ralph Lancaster Jr. of Portland, Maine, as special master, granting him broad authority to summon witnesses, issue subpoenas and gather any evidence he deems necessary.

The Supreme Court agreed in November to hear New Jersey's challenge to Delaware's claimed jurisdiction over a section of the Delaware River. Justices met last week to decide whether to schedule oral arguments or to appoint a special master to gather facts in the dispute, which involves New Jersey's effort to help energy giant BP build a liquefied natural gas plant on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River.

"Obviously, this means the case is going to go on longer than we would like, but we are prepared for whatever time it takes to see this case through," said BP spokesman Tom Mueller.

Delaware environmental officials last year rejected a permit application by Crown Landing LLC, a BP subsidiary, to build a 2,000-foot pier that would serve a liquefied natural gas facility proposed for Logan Township, N.J.

Delaware officials said the project represents an offshore bulk product transfer facility and heavy industry, both of which are prohibited under Delaware's coastal zone protection laws.

Under boundary determinations that date to the 17th century, Delaware controls the river up to the mean low-tide mark on the New Jersey shore.

New Jersey officials, who see the proposed LNG terminal as a boost to their state's economy, claim that a 1905 interstate compact gives New Jersey the right to control riparian access and structures on its side of the river, even if they extend across the border.

Collins J. Seitz Jr., a Wilmington attorney who is helping represent Delaware in the dispute, said he was pleased that the Supreme Court wanted to develop a complete record before resolving the case.

"I expect it will take some time to sort out all the historical information that will be presented to the special master," he said.

Peter Aseltine, spokesman for New Jersey's attorney general, said his state is confident in its position.

"Governor Corzine supports this project, which he believes is important for South Jersey's economic development," said Anthony Coley, spokesman for New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine. "He hopes this matter will be resolved expeditiously."

Lancaster, a Harvard-educated lawyer, said he has not followed the Delaware case, and he did not offer any timeline for how the case might unfold.

Lancaster has served as special master to the Supreme Court twice before. The first case involved a dispute between New Jersey and Nevada in the late 1980s over the disposal of hazardous waste.

The second involved a more recent fight between Virginia and Maryland over Virginia's attempt to place a water intake pipe in the Potomac River. The Supreme Court in 2003 upheld a determination by Lancaster that Virginia could withdraw water from the Potomac to supply fast-growing suburbs around Washington, D.C., without getting permission from Maryland.

Maryland owns the Potomac under a 1632 land grant from King Charles I, but a 1785 compact between the states gave Virginia certain water rights. Maryland argued that its historical control over the riverbed gave it oversight of Virginia's water plans, but a 7-2 majority of the court said the 1785 treaty allows Virginia to make various shoreline improvements and withdraw water.

The fact that Lancaster and the Supreme Court sided with Virginia was not lost on New Jersey Assemblyman John Burzichelli, D-Gloucester, who has engaged in a war of words with his Delaware counterparts over the LNG project.

"While I would not want to prejudge this particular case, there are similarities, and the thrust of New Jersey's legal challenge is very similar to Virginia's case," he said.

Last week, a state House committee in Delaware released a bill authorizing the governor to establish boundary markers and to mobilize the National Guard "to defend against encroachments upon the territory of the State of Delaware."

The bill, which may come up for a House vote Tuesday, was dismissed as "pathetic saber rattling" by Burzichelli, who has joked that he might inquire into the seaworthiness of the retired battleship USS New Jersey, now a floating museum on the Camden waterfront.

2006-01-27T22:15:00.000-07:00

January: Favorites (no order)

1) all the friends who make me roffle and keep me sane
2) The versions of Debussy's "Beau Soir" and Schumann's "Mondnacht" on Classical Barbra (the album's not a masterpiece, but it's quite good when Babs scales back the little Broadway showstopping that's there and respects the material, and when the lieder she's singing aren't frothy/gothy middlebrow crowd-pleasers like Fauré or Orff)
3) Pete Seeger's "Walking Down Death Row" (on Dangerous Songs!?)
4) E! True Hollywood Story (recently watched: Angelina Jolie, Meg Ryan, Mel Gibson, Tawny Kitaen)
5) the jukebox at the Commonwealth (and also the cheap, cold Amstel Light)
6) Kidz Bop's enthusiastic and letter-perfect rendering of Crazy Frog's "Axel F" (a/k/a "The Frog Song") (and apparently Kidz Bop 9 has "Pon De Replay" and "Wake Me Up When September Ends"!)
7) The Sleuth Channel (cop shows galore, including Miami Vice)
8) Trader Joe's Tuna in Red Panang Curry Sauce with TJ's jasmine rice
9) learning that not only can I buy a Slurpee in the borough of Manhattan, but i can buy a sugar-free Slurpee!
10) my local likka sto and wino emporium

2006-01-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

The Javits Center is one of my favorite pieces of New York architecture -- like Manhattan itself, it's so imposing and utilitarian. But I think people see it as representing an older, grittier NYC, a vision of Midtown West as an HQ for no-nonsense worker-bees to buckle down and get straight to whatever they're there for. That's changing now that developers are trying to gentrify every potentially desirable parcel of land, and the city is promoting some bullshit about "repurposing" the waterfront away from its storied industrial history and into a freshly landscaped mini-mall. That said, I've been looking at some designs for the new Javits center, and it's actually sorta pretty, even if it doesn't look anything like the New York I know. Which is the problem with all of this "NYC 2.0" stuff. It's all well and good, but it's devoid of character and might as well be any other anonymous-looking wealthy city in the U.S. or Canada -- Boston, Toronto, Denver. Why are cities so ashamed of their recent past? Will we be ashamed of this era in 30-40 years?

2006-01-22T21:10:00.000-07:00

You know you watch too much TV when you recognize that the woman in the PediaSure baby formula commercial is the same actress from the K-Y Warming Liquid ad.

2006-01-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

free enneagram test

Type Five
The Investigator
The perceptive, cerebral type. Fives are alert, insightful, and curious. They are able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and skills. Independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs. They become detached, yet high-strung and intense. They typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation. At their Best: visionary pioneers, often ahead of their time, and able to see the world in an entirely new way.

Profile Summary for Enneagram Type Five
Healthy: Observe everything with extraordinary perceptiveness and insight. Most mentally alert, curious, searching intelligence: nothing escapes their notice. Foresight and prediction. Able to concentrate: become engrossed in what has caught their attention. / Attain skillful mastery of whatever interests them. Excited by knowledge: often become expert in some field. Innovative and inventive, producing extremely valuable, original works. Highly independent, idiosyncratic, and whimsical. At Their Best: Become visionaries, broadly comprehending the world while penetrating it profoundly. Open-minded, take things in whole, in their true context. Make pioneering discoveries and find entirely new ways of doing and perceiving things.

Average: Begin conceptualizing and fine-tuning everything before acting — working things out in their minds: model building, preparing, practicing, and gathering more resources. Studious, acquiring technique. Become specialized, and often "intellectual," often challenging accepted ways of doing things. / Increasingly detached as they become involved with complicated ideas or imaginary worlds. Become preoccupied with their visions and interpretations rather than reality. Are fascinated by off-beat, esoteric subjects, even those involving dark and disturbing elements. Detached from the practical world, a "disembodied mind," although high-strung and intense. / Begin to take an antagonistic stance toward anything which would interfere with their inner world and personal vision. Become provocative and abrasive, with intentionally extreme and radical views. Cynical and argumentative.

Unhealthy: Become reclusive and isolated from reality, eccentric and nihilistic. Highly unstable and fearful of aggressions: they reject and repulse others and all social attachments. / Get obsessed yet frightened by their threatening ideas, becoming horrified, delirious, and prey to gross distortions and phobias. / Seeking oblivion, they may commit suicide or have a psychotic break with reality. Deranged, explosively self-destructive, with schizophrenic overtones. Generally corresponds to the Schizoid Avoidant and Schizotypal personality disorders.

Key Motivations: Want to possess knowledge, to understand the environment, to have everything figured out as a way of defending the self from threats from the environment.

Examples: Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Georgia O'Keefe, Stanley Kubrick, John Lennon, Lily Tomlin, Gary Larson, Laurie Anderson, Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, James Joyce, Bjšrk, Susan Sontag, Emily Dickenson, Agatha Christie, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jane Goodall, Glenn Gould, John Cage, Bobby Fischer, Tim Burton, David Lynch, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Trent Reznor, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, and "Fox Mulder" (X Files).

2006-01-04T21:02:00.000-07:00

There hasn't been much activity over at A Joshua Tree In Every Pot since November, but today Chris is back and he's got a MEME. And so it is my duty as lame-ass netizen of the blogiverse to post my own and pass it on.

Four jobs you've had in your life: copy editor, proofreader, sales & marketing douchebag, government relations douchebag

Four movies you could watch over and over: Oh jeez, don't get me started. I'll just leave TCM on and sooner or later they'll all be rerun anyway.

Four places you've lived: Brooklyn, NY; New Orleans, LA; Binghamton, NY, Portland, OR.

Four TV shows you love to watch: Good Eats, Seconds From Disaster, The Colbert Report, any of those A&E true-crime shows

Four places you've been on vacation: Rome, Italy; Seattle, WA; Albuquerque, NM; Montreal, Quebec

Four websites you visit daily: American Red Cross in Greater New York (the start page on my work account), Cyburbia.org, Gotham Gazette, NY1's The Political ItCH.

Four of your favorite foods: baked mac & cheese (with lots of paprika), chicken shawarma, green corn tamales, ANYTHING Ethiopian

Four places you'd rather be: Glasgow, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires in the '50s, Beirut in the '60s

2006-01-04T20:45:00.000-07:00

And speaking of the Rust Belt, meet Gary, Indiana. (via the Cyburbia Forums)

Wikipedia on Gary:

Gary is the largest city located in Lake County in northwest Indiana, near the city of Chicago. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 102,746 and is the largest Indiana city that is not the county seat. It borders Lake Michigan and is known for its large steel mills (and the attendant air pollution) and as the hometown of the musical Jackson family. Gary is home of Indiana University Northwest, a regional campus of the Indiana University system.

Gary, Indiana is also the subject of a song in the musical The Music Man, and songs and albums by The Jacksons: "Going Back to Indiana," and "2300 Jackson Street."

2006-01-03T08:02:00.000-07:00

It all began in Camden, New Jersey when a local businessman took the idea from his mother. Richard Hollingshead's mother complained she did not think the seats in the movie theater were designed for all sizes of people. She told her son it was a shame you could not sit comfortably in your own car and watch a movie.

With that idea in mind, Richard utilized a white wall of his auto parts machine shop to show a movie using a 16 millimeter projector along what would become Admiral Wilson Boulevard. He eventually built a new "Park-In" movie that opened on June 7, 1933, for $60,000. Six-hundred cars attended opening night. The first movie shown was "Wife Beware" starring Adolph Menjou.

from a Daily Iowegian article, courtesy of The American Roadside.

2006-01-01T11:32:00.000-07:00

Starbucks Everywhere: every Starbucks ever, in photographs. Regardless of your feelings on the Big S, this is a fascinating (and often, surprisingly flattering) way to see America as it is in 2005/2006. There's a lot less homogeneity to the stores than most people expect -- my favorites are the ones housed in newly restored 1920s Main Street U.S.A. sorta buildings in upstate/rust-belt cities. Just... cuz it's nice to see those buildings looking beautiful again. :-)

You'll wanna scroll down the page for the full list.

2005-12-27T22:06:00.000-07:00

I don't get up to Museum Mile that often anymore, but I recently did make it all the way up to 5th and 103rd to check out the "New York Comes Back: Mayor Ed Koch and the City" exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. I love mayors, their frazzled mania, the way their craziness is an indicator of where their city's at, their mythos in general. So I thought the parts of the exhibit having to do with Koch The Man were fascinating (he had a Trump-like penchant for immediately firing any staffer who wasn't cutting muster, and he fired many), while the urban-redevelopment propaganda was a little more suspect. I checked the website later on, and sure enough one of the major contributors to "New York Comes Back" was Forest City Ratner (and Bloomberg as well, but that's a no-brainer).

I recommend "New York Comes Back" if you're into what I'm into -- but please take it with a grain of salt, and remember that it's being paid for with a lot more than museumgoers' $7-a-head suggested donations.

2005-12-23T18:08:00.000-07:00

found:

2005-12-16T07:01:00.000-07:00

Best new Flickr photo pool in forever: the Stephen Pastel group!!!

2005-12-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

Curbed on what most Brooklyn residents already knew about the Park Slope Food Co-op but were afraid to admit.

2005-12-06T03:33:00.000-07:00

Date on which House Majority Leader Tom DeLay reportedly spoke to three boys at an evacuation center, comparing their experience to camp and saying: “Now tell me the truth, is this kind of fun?”: September 9, 2005

Because you still can't get enough of this wonderful trainwreck: the Drum Major Institute's Injustice Index on Hurricane Katrina.

2005-12-01T02:54:00.000-07:00

So New Orleans is getting free citywide WiFi. And surprise surprise, people who are frightened of technology and have NO FUCKING IDEA that it's 2005 are bitching up a storm. Hi, would you guys stop saying smug idiotic things like "so THIS is where my Red Cross donation is going?" The Red Cross and FEMA are in the business of emergency management and disaster response. They don't run cities. ~~They have nothing whatsoever to do with WiFi~~ (see below), and no your money is not going toward that. Whatever you think of those organizations, I bet you'll agree that they both have their hands pretty full right now.

Second, why is it always one or the other with these critics -- why can't an annual budget include a gradual year-long WiFi rollout AND the normal city services? And third, no it's not just a luxury for the wealthy idle class. If you can scrape together a couple hundred bucks, you can buy a crappy Dell laptop and use it to scour Monster and send out resumes. Or you can go to the library and use their computers.

It's absolutely necessary for a modern-age metropolis, especially one as troubled as New Orleans, to provide internet access to its citizens and businesses -- it's THE way we communicate now, and it's not like all those unemployed people whose homes got thrashed can afford to buy into one of the telcos' expensive broadband plans.

Sure New Orleans is still largely without power, and electricity beats internet. But the idea is that BOTH those things will be up and running in the coming year.

Update: I missed Chris Drake's statement that FEMA will be shouldering some of the costs of running the network. But again, I see this as a "helping the city get back on its feet" measure, not a permanent one. The comment below reinforces why wireless communication is necessary (and not just for "blogging" and "web surfing," as a few ignorant knee-jerks put it).

Interesting comments. As the person responsible for building the network, it is fun to see all the comments from the proverbial peanut gallery. I totally understand some of the thoughts from the outside world. Let me give some thoughts... Understand that the Mayor and all of the City are fighting this battle on many fronts. Today alone the Mayor went from meetings with Feds, to the tourism center announcement, to our WiFi announcement, to a tour of the recovered areas, to a Christmas Tree lighting, to a Town Hall meeting. Yes, New Orleans East, the 9th Ward and Lakeview have a long road in front of them and a lot of uncertainty. But the areas of the City where commerce (and some damn fine restaurants) have returned desperately need communications as a key element of the continued recovery. The CBD, French Quarter, Warehouse District, Uptown, Algiers, etc. were all largely unscathed and are in full-blown operation, have full power, gas, water, sewer, trash and other services. But businesses need communications and data to run. This gives them that. 512Kbps is not perfect, but it is great for people who have nothing. There are thousands of laptops in the City and people who need the connection. And all of this overlooks the MAIN purpose for the network we are building. That is to serve the needs of the City itself. We have Police, Fire, EMS, Safety and Permits and other City officials doing way more than their normal work load. Allowing them to access video in the field, file reports remotely, dispatch, etc. via this network is a tremendous force multiplier that we desperately need. Intel, Tropos and Pronto have donated hardware and engineers/expertise. Motorola has donated time from their engineers. And our guys have ramped up our skills and now deploy up to 15 nodes a day, all while still meeting our normal (if you can call building a 150 person Emergency Operations Center with computers, Internet and Voice over WiFi in 4 days normal) IT obligations. FEMA will pay for much of the network going forward (capital costs) as part of the permitting and inspecitons process and it will actually lower the cost of that project for all of us because we need fewer inspectors that way.

This is an exciting time and an exciting model for Muni WiFi. We do hope to have the law modified or overturned and be able to offer better service as the network builds out. But it is working great and we have over 200 registered users by the end of the first day today.

Thanks for reading, and everyone come to New Orleans for some good food and a good time. And enjoy the free WiFi. We tested Skype calls today, and it rocks. :-) See you all at Mardi Gras 2006.

Chris Drake
Mayor's Office of Technology
City of New Orleans

2005-11-30T23:59:00.000-07:00

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who made the passing of my 29th birthday that much more palatable. Festivities TK.

2005-11-28T04:21:00.000-07:00

Backroom Deal Breaker: Shining bright lights on a backroom dealmaking tradition that gives rise to the New York City Council Speaker, effectively the second most powerful position in the City of New York (a valuable info source for those following the Speaker campaign). Elsewhere, the Daily News says "the whole thing has piggy-piggy smell" (re the overwhelming push to abolish-or-at-least-extend term limits), and the Village Voice calls candidate Bill Di Blasio a "poster boy for conflict of interest" (re his hypocritical position on campaign finance standards).

2005-11-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

Via Brand Autopsy: a New York article called Average Joe. For the record, I've been big-upping Dunkin' Donuts' coffee for years, especially their iced coffee. One thing you can be pretty sure of with DD's coffee -- no mouse droppings!

Recently, I had noticed that new Dunkin’ Donuts shops seemed to be spontaneously materializing on every other block in New York. A little research confirmed it: Dunkin’ Donuts—whose previous claim to local fame was an epic episode of bad publicity in the form of 1998 New York Post photos of mice nibbling on doughnuts in a Dunkin’ window—has increased the number of its stores in the metropolitan area from 600 to 1,200 since 2002 and plans to open another 100 stores by next summer, bringing the total to 1,300 (by comparison, there are 237 Gap stores in the metro area). So I placed a call to Dunkin’s Canton, Massachusetts, headquarters with the hope of getting a flack to discuss its plans for New York coffee hegemony. After three months of negotiations and a dozen phone calls, I was instructed to be at the Dunkin’ Donuts at 40th Street and Second Avenue on a Monday morning in October. Imagine my surprise when I was met by not one, not two, but eight Dunkin’ employees. There was the flack, the outside-agency flack, three executives, the franchise owner, his son, and someone to drive the trail vehicle. Soon, I was deluged by a shower of business cards, fair-trade beans, and Coffee Coolattas. Over the course of the day, I would be shuttled to four stores, a building site, and a proposed location that I could see only if I swore on a box of Munchkins not to divulge its address. Oh, and as an afterthought, I was shown where they make the doughnuts.

2005-11-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

The WSJ hits upon something I've been saying for a long time, that we can tackle obesity through more mindful architecture and planning, creating spaces that promote exercise and limit the cheap conveniences that have come to define suburban complacency.

2005-11-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

You can't have a blog without a meme, can you? No you can't. Here's a new one that's been making the Myspace rounds. I added my name at the end -- first and middle compressed into one.

Take your name and put an album for each letter. Bonus points if you name the band/artist.

J- Jamboree [beat happening]
A- And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out [yo la tengo]
D- Double Nickels On The Dime [minutemen]
E- Electric Version [new pornographers]

M- Mule Variations [Tom Waits]
I- Imperial Bedroom [Elvis Costello]
N- Nomad [Lotus]
H- Hit & Run Holiday [My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult]

R- Reachin': a refutation of time and space [Digable Planets]
O- On Through The Night [Def Leppard]
B- Believo!- [Enon]
E- End Is Near - [The New Year]
R- Rasing Hell - [RUN DMC]
T- Thousand Leaves - [Sonic Youth]
O- Outhud - [Outhud]

L-London Calling (The Clash)
O-Odelay! (Beck)
R-Ride the Fader (Chavez)
E-Exploded Drawing (Polvo)
N-No Pocky For Kitty (Superchunk)
A-A.M. (Wilco)

J-Junkyard [The Birthday Party]
E-Exile on Main Street [The Rolling Stones]
N- No Depression [Uncle Tupelo]
N-Nowhere [Ride]
I- If I Should Fall from Grace with God [the Pogues]
F-Fire of Love [Gun Club]
E-Endless Summer [Beach Boys]
R-Reign in Blood [Slayer]

J-Jesu [Jesu]
O-Orchid [Orchid]
E-Endless Summer [Fennesz]

E - Eazy Duz It [Eazy E]
M - Marquee Moon [Televizzle]
I - I Keed [Triumph The Insult Comic Dog]
L - Low Life [New Order]
Y - Your Disco Needs You [Kylie Minogue]

M - My Life [Mary J. Blige]
I - Idlewild South [The Allman Brothers Band]
C - Closer [Joy Division]
H - Highway to Hell [AC/DC]
A - Another Green World [Eno]
E - Everything Is Wrong [Moby]
L - Last Night a DJ Saved My Life [Indeep]
A - All That You Can't Leave Behind [U2]
N - New York [Lou Reed]
G - Get Lucky [Loverboy]
E - Everybody's Free [Rozalla]
L - Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo [Jeff Mills]
O - Om [John Coltrane]

J - J to tha L-O! The Remixes [Jennifer Lopez]
O - Only Theatre of Pain [Christian Death]
D - Dancer With Bruised Knees [Kate and Anna McGarrigle]
Y - You [Tuxedomoon]
B - Bullshit Detector Vol. 3 [V/A, Crass Records]
E - Escape From Dragon House [Dengue Fever]
T - Time And A Word [Yes]
H - Hymns of the 49th Parallel [k.d. lang]

2005-11-16T05:57:00.000-07:00

Via the ArchNewsNow newsletter: E. Thomas Casey, former dean of Taliesin West, dies at 81, and Gotham Gazette on the messy, "through the looking glass"- style development issues plaguing Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards project.

Related:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation's Taliesin West page

Empire State Development Corporation Atlantic Yards Arena and Redevelopment Project

2005-11-10T01:14:00.000-07:00

Couch, Montague St.

2005-11-08T22:25:00.000-07:00

Election Day is a Holiday
by Ogden Nash
November 1932

People on whom I do not bother to dote
Are people who do not bother to vote.
Heaven forbid that they should ever be exempt
From contumely, obloquy and various kinds of contempt.
Some of them like Toscanini and some like Rudy Vallee,
But all of them take about as much interest in their right to ballot as their
right to ballet.
They haven’t voted since the heyday of Miss Russell (Lillian)
And excuse themselves by saying What’s the difference of one vote in
fifty million?
They have such refined and delicate palates
That they can discover no one worthy of their ballots,
And then when someone terrible gets elected!
They say, There, that’s just what I expected!
And they go around for four years spouting discontented criticisms
And contented witticisms,
And then when somebody to oppose the man they oppose gets
nominated
They say Oh golly golly he’s the kind of man I’ve always abominated,
And they have discovered that if you don’t take time out to go to the
polls
You can manage very nicely to get through thirty-six holes.
O let us cover these clever people very conspicuously with loathing,
For they are un-citizens in citizens’ clothing.
They attempt to justify their negligence
On the grounds that no candidate appeals to people of their
‘integligence,’
But I am quite sure that if Abraham Lincoln (Rep.) ran against Thomas
Jefferson (Dem.)
Neither man would be appealing enough to squeeze a vote out of them.

Congratulations to Freddy Ferrer for putting up a surprisingly good fight. I didn't vote for him, but he didn't get clobbered like I thought he would. And to everyone I did vote for who won, w00t w00t!

2005-11-05T01:52:00.000-07:00

Very telling: a new study about Restless Legs Syndrome suggests the numbness, aching, and need to move around that RLS sufferers experience might be symptomatic of other physical and psychological issues, including stressful situations and anxiety. I've had some bad sciatica in my right leg recently and I'm sure I can attribute it to lingering "radiating" pain from a back injury I incurred a few months ago. With the aid of a chiropractor the back trouble has subsided, while the leg keeps bothering me. It bears mentioning that this is a nutty time in my life -- and in these especially nerve-wracking past couple of weeks, I've noticed that my foot has been falling asleep a lot. For no reason. This wasn't happening before.

Of the article's suggestions, what can I realistically do? I'm working on keeping the diet and exercise under control; I'm GOING to curb my drinking and occasional smoking (really) (but the caffeine and the other drugz stay. I need those). I will be asking my doctor about Requip though.

I mean for this post to be informational and helpful rather than expository and Livejournalish. If I sound unusually neurotic... sorry bout that.

2005-11-04T00:26:00.000-07:00

From BusinessWeek Online's excellent "Innovation and Design" section: a photographic tour through Dutch Design Week 2005, including (as pictured below) a metal bookshelf "custom-made to replicate a stylized rendering of the voice pattern of its owner." (Warning: article doesn't look so hot in Firefox.)

2005-11-03T19:04:00.000-07:00

Although my body is hardly a temple, I do make a habit of reading nutrition labels and keeping abreast of what those confusing scientific words mean. So over the past couple of years I've really started to pay attention to which food products contain additives, preservatives, unnatural dyes, and hydrogenated oils. Once I learned what some of this stuff actually was (and what else the active ingredients were used for -- pesticide, for example), the decision to seek out organic foods wasn't a tough one.

Now a lot of companies, seeing the success of Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, are looking for ways to incorporate this "organic" buzzword into their product lines. A New York Times piece reports on what some consumer and trade associations feel organic means (or should mean). There are concerns that as manufacturers start throwing around "organic" willy-nilly, any regulation of the term will have to include a wide-enough definition to satisfy corporate interests.

This story comes to the blogosphere via Amuse Bouche, who also wrote an MSNBC article last year about labeling concerns.

2005-11-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

Greetings from jury duty. I'm in the lounge of the Kings County Supreme Court, waiting for my name to be called and enjoying the free wifi. With all this downtime I can catch up on fun stuff like news feeds, including this one from Binary Bonsai about an underground city in the UK:

The subterranean complex that was built in the 1950s to house the Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan’s cabinet and 4,000 civil servants in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack is being thrown open to commercial use. Just four maintenance men are left.

Already two uses are being considered: a massive data store for City firms or the biggest wine cellar in Europe. More outlandish ideas put forward include a nightclub for rave parties, a 1950s theme park or a reception centre for asylum seekers. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has ruled out any suggestion of using it to store nuclear waste or providing open public access because of the dangers that still lurk below.

2005-10-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

If you're a Curbed fan you probably saw these when they were posted, but I'm still catching up with my reading, so please forgive my tardiness in blogging about the Astoria fast-food conspiracy. If it's indeed a plot by the Greeks to reclaim their turf and replace seedy chain restaurants with seedy tavernas, I'm all for it and I'll be on the next N train out there.

(Edit: The below excerpt speculates that the Greek community wants to keep out "a certain ethnic group that really loves fried foods," but in my case I just want to keep out the fast-food industry. No need to read anything more into my post.)

Wanted to tell you about whats going down up on the Ditmars area in Astoria. First of all, Burger King closed without any explanation, which was really odd because it was popular (busy).

THEN..... McDonalds burned down in a "mysterious" 3-alarm Fire.

THIRD.... KFC "lost its lease".......how does a billion dollar international company lose its lease?

All of these places had been operating for years. And you can't blame gentrification; there are still lots of nasty-ass shops on the 31st street where these places are. One dude who tried to raise the rent on the medical office space he owned has had to eat about 14 months of vacancy.

The upshot of this is that there are now no fast food joints near the Ditmars station. Been hearing some wispers that it's some sort of Greek conspiracy to keep out a certain ethnic group that really loves fried foods.

2005-10-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

At the ripe old age of almost-29, I've finally been called for my first jury duty... as a standby. I can't wait! If I get to serve, I'm gonna go all Henry Fonda on these guys and make their lives miserable.

2005-10-13T08:21:00.000-07:00

One internet cliche I never tire of is the "vintage postcard" site. I know that after a while it's hard to tell the Route 66 roadside motels from the 19th-century faux-classical state buildings, but that doesn't stop me from picking a few I like and ogling them admiringly for as long as I feel like. I found CardCow yesterday while Googling for something else, and I've kept the page open in the background ever since, waiting for a good opportunity to blog about it.

2005-10-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

I haven't read the Anonymous Lawyer blog all that thoroughly yet (I realize by the size of the archive that it's been around a long time, but I've been sucking at keeping up with blogs over the past year). I've worked in some lower-echelon law jobs and have harbored an on-again-off-again desire to go to l-school (including a pathetic attempt at taking the LSAT), so I'm sure I'll find this endlessly engrossing.

2005-10-04T03:57:00.000-07:00

MY OCTOBER 2005 FUCKING TEN

1) referring to october as "rocktober"
2) dylan documentary yadda yadda
3) drowning in a sea of MATH (as i prepare for the GRE, less than a month away, HFS OMG WTF LOL)
4) holes (the movie based on the louis sachar book)
5) the national geographic channel's hippos: the dark side (they're killers, you know!)
6) new york state apples, in season (i.e. RIGHT NOW)
7) this great spiced belgian ale called la chouffe
8) singing nuns
9) dorothy kilgallen (specifically for her outstanding work on what's my line?)
10) 2% milk (in coffee and cereal)

2005-10-01T01:26:00.000-07:00

Would you have been a nazi? Here's how I fared on this OKCupid test.

The Expatriate
Achtung! You are 15% brainwashworthy, 40% antitolerant, and 23% blindly patriotic

Congratulations! You are not susceptible to brainwashing, your values and cares extend beyond the borders of your own country, and your Blind Patriotism does not reach unhealthy levels. If you had been German in the 30s, you would've left the country.

One bad scenario -- as I hypothetically project you back in time -- is that you just wouldn't have cared one way or the other about Nazism. Maybe politics don't interest you enough. But the fact that you took this test means they probably do. I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt.

Did you know that many of the smartest Germans departed prior to the beginning of World War II, because they knew some evil shit was brewing? Brain Drain. Many of them were scientists. It is very possible you could have been one of them.

Conclusion: born and raised in Germany in the early 1930's, you would not have been a Nazi.

The Would You Have Been A Nazi? Test

2005-09-29T04:55:00.000-07:00

someone should tell these guys what "vom" means...

Teach New Yorkers how to COOK!!!
Reply to: anon-100499675@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-09-28, 10:00AM EDT

Volunteer Positions in FoodChange’s Vegetable of the Month Club program

Community based nutrition education - Teach New Yorkers to enjoy cooking fresh vegetables in season

We invite culinary and nutrition education students and professionals and food enthusiasts in general to become VOM Volunteer Leaders and assist trained instructors in hands-on cooking based nutrition education workshops in New York City neighborhood organizations. Volunteers will be assigned to the same site every month. Sites may include food pantries, WIC agencies, public schools, senior centers, teen programs, community centers, parenting skill programs etc. and are located in all five boroughs.

Volunteers will:
1. Participate in a preliminary 4 hour volunteer training
2. Volunteer 2-3 hours each month in an assigned community based organization for a minimum of six months.
3. Assist workshop leaders in delivering the VOM™ workshops in a variety of capacities. Possible volunteer duties may include any of the following tasks:
-Collaborate with the workshop leader in planning the workshop
-Assist in presenting the workshop
-Evaluate and document VOM™ lessons and activities
-Support the teaching and reinforcement of food safety techniques
-Participate in VOM™ food shopping
-Assist in guided field trips
-Provide educational input and ideas for workshop participants
-Plan, oversee, and take part in integrated VOM™ activities
4. Maintain confidentiality of all workshop participants and agency clients in keeping with individual VOM™ agency rules. All volunteers are expected to maintain the highest standards of conduct and personal integrity when volunteering with agencies collaborating with the Vegetable of the Month Club™ and FoodChange.
5. FoodChange will provide free training, an opportunity to teach cooking skills, networking opportunity, community work, 3hrs/month or more volunteer experience, school credit.
6. If interested, please contact Jennifer Prissel at 212-894-8070 or jprissel@foodchange.org.

* this is in or around All boroughs...
* no -- it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

100499675

2005-09-19T00:55:00.000-07:00

I was born in 1976, at the cutoff point of what some people call Generation X. I mention all this because '70s pop culture is supposedly one of Gen-X's pet fascinations, and I caught the tail end of a lot of '70s fads as they were crossing the threshold into the early '80s.

There's one fad I was never aware of until recently: the pizza-parlor-with-a-pipe-organ. Technically, the first such place opened in 1962 (Hayward, California's Ye Olde Pizza Joynt), as a renewed interest in the Wurlitzer organs from silent-era movie palaces was taking hold. 1962 also saw the birth of the Santa Clara, California restaurant Pizza & Pipes (which, over the years, turned into a successful regional mini-chain with locations in California and Washington State).

In the early '70s, the craze really took off. San Diego had Organ Power Pizza; Portland, Oregon had Organ Grinder Pizza; Phoenix had Organ Stop Pizza (in 1975 a second location opened in nearby Mesa -- it's this one that's still in business today). One of the last to cash in was Uncle Milt's in Vancouver, Washington (1979; Milt finally closed shop in 1999). Perhaps someone in Las Vegas took note, because in 1999, the Fiesta Hotel & Casino cut the ribbon on Roxy's Pipe Organ Pizzeria.

It wasn't solely a phenomenon in the western states though. A quick Google search tells me there were organ pizzerias in Texas, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Iowa, Florida, and even one up in Toronto. I couldn't find any information about similar places in the Northeast U.S. (or even the Southeast, Florida excluded). I'm a native New Yorker, and I have no recollection of ever seeing or going to an organ pizzeria in my part of the country. If I'm wrong, I'd love to know. We certainly had Chuck E. Cheese (a similar breed of "family entertainment" restaurant, with a curiously similar mid-'70s Northern California background).

Pictured below: Organ Power and Uncle Milt's.

Pictured below: artwork from LPs released by Organ Grinder and Organ Stop.

2005-09-10T09:13:00.000-07:00

It's official: I'm signed up to take the GRE on November 1st. And now I will take a deep, measured breath as I prepare to descend into madness.

2005-09-07T14:16:00.000-07:00

On a lighter note, I may have found a new favorite snack food: Trader Joe's "Joe-Joe's," an Oreo analog with no corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, or weird artificial additives. Sugar, yes, but it's real sugar, and real anything makes food taste better. As long as you don't eat the whole box at once (suggested serving size: two cookies), there's not that much to feel guilty about.

2005-09-05T22:04:00.000-07:00

Rubella Ballet - "Every Second Counts"

2005-09-03T01:53:00.000-07:00

So who is Michael Chertoff, current U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security and evil not-so-genius responsible for keeping the Red Cross out of the city of New Orleans?

A few links for ya:

MIKE CHERTOFF'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS: BUSH'S NEW HOMELAND SECURITY CZAR

Circuit Judge Michael Chertoff, an appointee of Pres. George W. Bush, has found that despite significant evidence of harassment of gay people in Jamaica, Oneil Orlando Parker’s asylum petition should not be granted.

and this, which provides a handy summary of Chertoff's agenda:

Chertoff is a member in good standing in the Federalist Society; a cabal of radical lawyers devoted to the systematic dismantling of the Bill of Rights. Already, they've provided much of the legal rationale for the unlawful detention of aliens, the enhanced powers of the Executive, the indefinite incarceration of POW's and the cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners. They've also made strides in crushing what few regulations still exist to protect both consumers and environment.

Chertoff has been an effective conduit for the Federalist ideology. Following 9-11, he masterminded the round-up of 1100 Muslim suspects; dumping them in prison without bothering to file charges. None of the suspects were provided with attorneys or allowed to challenge the terms of their detention. Instead they were held in solitary confinement, abused, and either deported or released after secret tribunals. Chertoff effectively rescinded the Bill of Rights to pursue his blinkered witch-hunt. His actions made no one any safer, nor were they intended to. They were designed to show how easily legal protections are eviscerated during a national emergency. Don't think Chertoff and co. haven't monitored the affects of hysteria on public sensibilities. For the Bush team, demagoguery is the primary tenet of good governance.

Months after the illegal detentions, the Justice's Dept's Inspector General harshly criticized the draconian and unproductive steps that Chertoff authorized. The General dismissed the arrests as "indiscriminate and haphazard"; a clear violation of basic human rights and civil liberties. His reprimand was shrugged off by the impervious Chertoff, who later admitted to Congress that he would have done the same thing all over again.

Nat Hentoff on the same subject:

As for the detainees' right to contact lawyers, Chertoff and the others in the room, reports Brill, knew that under INS rules, the prisoners "were entitled to call a lawyer from jail, but the lists the INS provided of available lawyers invariably had phone numbers that were not in service." (Emphasis added.)

2005-09-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

Well this is a big WTF. Please read the following Daily Kos post if you need any further persuasion about how deplorably hateful our administration is.

My first diary! This whole week has been so depressing. My Red Cross donation was one bright spot. At least I had done something to help.

Then, after reading dKos and the other blogs all week and seeing over and over again comments that that FEMA and the NG were no where to be seen from the people on the ground in NO, I was wondering where the Red Cross was in all this. They were never mentioned. It was like they didn't exist. And, after yesterday's drama at the convention center, the Brown and Chertoff lies, the Red Cross was still MIA. Then, earlier today, I saw a note that the Red Cross was not allowed to enter NO. Hmm, that's doesn't make sense. This simmered for a couple hours.

So I called the Red Cross and asked them if its true....

And, to my surprise, the nice lady answering the phone said it was true and they told/asked/ordered not to enter NO. She then went right into her spiel about all the other work the Red Cross was doing across the region. I said that's nice, but I still didn't understand why they weren't in NO. To my amazement, she patiently explained it to me. I even called back to verify what she said. This time she asked if I was media, I said no, just a concerned and confused contributor.

So here goes: Homeland Security (her term, not mine) told the Red Cross DO NOT enter New Orleans and says this still now. And why, you may ask? Not Security. Not worker safety. Not lack of access. It was because people would be drawn to the Red Cross food and they wouldn't want to go to be evacuated. So I asked: "The people starving and dying at the convention center yesterday couldn't get Red Cross food and water because they would be drawn to the food at the convention center, where they were, and not want to be evacuated from the convention center where no evacuations were going on or planned and all the while they are dying". (Actually, it was a couple questions.) She went back into her spiel about all of the other good work they were doing. When I asked again, she said yes, that was true. She seem relieved to admit it.

In closing, I asked if she asked this question before since she was very familiar with the answer she gave. She said yes. And I promised another donation. Which they will get after this post.

So, the question for Bushies, why was the Red Cross banned from NO when they knew people were starving? Could it be they were saving the convention center rescue until Bush's visit today? It certainly seems like it. Doesn't it?

Red Cross National Affairs number (202-303-5551)

2005-09-02T18:42:00.000-07:00

If you'd like to donate money to help Katrina victims but you're not sure how your charity of choice will spend it, Give.org is a great "checks & balances" resource for tracking nonprofit organizations. The Red Cross puts 91% of its donations towards directly helping those who need aid, while America's Second Harvest uses an impressive 98%. My take on this is that any charity that spends over 90 percent on aid is a class act and totally worth donating to.

One effort operating on a more local, grassroots level is ACORN, a New Orleans- based nonprofit (and "the nation's largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families, working together for social justice and stronger communities") that is accepting donations for its Hurricane Recovery Fund.

How will donations to the ACORN Hurricane Recovery Fund be used?

ACORN is not a relief organization -- we are a national community organization with headquarters in New Orleans and a deep membership in low and moderate income communities there.

We need funds to:

1. Establish a temporary Headquarters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana;
2. Reopen our New Orleans offices as soon as possible;
3. As we reopen and rebuild, we will unite community members to face the challenges at hand:

* Servicing the housing and credit needs of our communities;
* Organizing to see that low income neighborhoods and families get the help the need.

Already, in this chaotic situation, ACORN members are uniting to support each other.

* Houston ACORN members are preparing to meet arriving evacuees at the Superdome to offer support, and house fellow ACORN members in their homes.
* With cell phones down, we are using our website (www.acorn.org) to let connect staff, members and others get in touch and offer help.

Your donation will help us get our local and national offices up and running, so we can serve our communities in this time of dire need.

Thank you for your support.

2005-08-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

A particularly vivid paragraph from a Times-Picayune article at NOLA.com:

About 5 p.m., almost as if on cue, the battery power of all the house alarms in the neighborhood seemed to reach a critical level, and they all went off, making it sound as if the area was under an air-raid warning. Two men surviving on generator power in the Lake Terrace neighborhood near the Lake Pontchartrain levee still had a dry house, but they were watching the rising water in the yard nervously. They were planning to head out to retrieve a vast stash of beer, champagne and hard liquor they found washed onto the levee. As night fell, the sirens of house alarms finally fell silent, and the air filled with a different, deafening and unfamiliar sound: the extraordinary din of thousands of croaking frogs.

2005-08-29T13:54:00.000-07:00

Hey New Orleans: take care of yourself. You're a delicate, volatile, strange place, and although I'm sure I won't go back, I hope you'll always be there.

i am an aztec

2005-08-27T01:24:00.000-07:00

aztec
Originally uploaded by stockholm cindy.

I scanned a bunch of '60s Road & Track ads (and covers, and whatnot) some time in the not-too-distant past and I've finally created a set for them on Flickr. I love these and I hope you do too.

2005-08-20T23:13:00.000-07:00

Astoria's American Museum of the Moving Image has some Billy Wilder flicks on tap for September and October, including Ace In the Hole, which has so far managed to elude me every time it's played locally. Funny, I was JUST talking about this movie with someone.

Saturday, October 29
2:00 p.m.
ACE IN THE HOLE (A.K.A. THE BIG CARNIVAL)
Introduced By Wilder biographer Ed Sikov
1951, 111 mins. With Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling. In this acidic portrayal of a media circus, Douglas plays a reporter who turns the attempted rescue of a mine cave-in victim into a national frenzy.

The Airplane Book

2005-08-20T18:59:00.000-07:00

The Airplane Book: inside title
Originally uploaded by wardomatic.

Thank you for choosing Ward-O-Matic Airlines. We'd like to start off your trip through the garish 70's with a couple of our crew members. Notice that hairstyles were anything-goes in 1972, not to mention paint-jobs on aircraft.

Art Seiden is the illustrator for this very amusing children's book from 1972. The colors are worth the trip alone. That is, if you can stomach it. Be afraid, be very afraid.

2005-08-18T05:05:00.000-07:00

i'm up at 5 a.m. and i was wondering about the etymology of "scandinavia" and unsurprisingly there was a wiki:

Etymology

The etymology for the names Scandinavia and Scania is considered to be the same.

The name is most probably derived from the Germanic *Skathin- meaning "danger" (cf. English scathing and unscathed) and *awjo meaning "island". It may have referred to the dangerous banks around Skanör (skan- is the same as in Scandinavia, and -ör means "sandbanks") and Falsterbo in Scania in southernmost Scandinavia.

Alternatively, the first element is sometimes attributed to the Scandinavian giantess Skadi from Norse mythology.

The original form would have been *Skaðinawjo, which gave rise to different forms in Germanic languages and by non-Germanic scribes. In Beowulf we meet the forms Scedenigge and Scedeland. Ptolemy uses the form Scandia, and Scatinavia appears in Roman texts, e.g. Pliny the Elder, whereas Pomponius Mela used the deviant form Codanovia. The form Scadinavia, the original home of the Langobards, appears in Paulus Diaconus' Historia Langobardorum[1], but in other versions of Historia Langobardorum appear the forms Scadan, Scandanan, Scadanan and Scatenauge[2]. In Jordanes' history of the Goths (AD 551) we meet the form Scandza their original home, separated by sea from the land of Europe (chapter 1, 4)[3].

The name of the Scandinavian mountain range, Skanderna in Swedish, is artificially derived from Skandinavien in the 19th century, in analogy with Alperna for the Alps. The commonly used names are Kölen "the Keel" or fjällen "the fells, the mountains".

2005-08-18T00:04:00.000-07:00

Now, I'm no Sandra Lee or anything, but I know how to pull off a SEMI-HOMEMADE recipe. Like tonight, when I conscripted a pedestrian store-bought barbecue sauce and sent it off to boot camp in southeast Asia. A little raw garlic (about three cloves, chopped coarsely), a tablespoon of chili sauce, a PROFUSE amount of rice wine vinegar, a tablespoon of granulated sugar (I like the sugar made from evaporated cane juice, but I'm weird), a quarter teaspoon of ground red pepper, half a teaspoon of cinnamon to bring the sweetness back around. Fabulous; the kind of sauce you abandon the rest of the meal for so you can eat it on its own.

(PS- After years of being unsure or feeling too guilty to admit as much, I can now say without reluctance that I DISLIKE "SMOKY" FLAVORS. Lapsang Souchong tea, smoked mozzarella, "smoky" Kansas City style barbecue sauce. This is not to say that I hate all smoked foods; smoked meats when done right are a wonderful, wonderful thing. Liquid smoke and other weird flavor enhancers probably have a lot to do with my dislike, but I'm no expert on that stuff so I can't say for sure. Maybe I'm just eating the wrong products.)

sex and the suburbs

2005-08-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

mccall's
Originally uploaded by stockholm cindy.

Up at Flickr: scans of some early '70s sewing patterns. I picked these up at a thrift store in rural Missouri on my way out west earlier this summer. And via Tucson, a few Time-Life books from their mid-'70s "The Art of Sewing" series.

quiche

2005-08-13T19:19:00.000-07:00

quiche
Originally uploaded by stockholm cindy.

just made and thoroughly enjoyed: bacon & roasted corn quiche. the shell is from scratch and the corn is fresh off the cob.

ok, so the slightly milky bit at the back (actually half & half, butter, eggs, and a mixture of crumbled provolone and lorraine swiss cheese) needed to set for a few minutes longer, but just a few minutes (which it did). i had somewhat of a "burning milkfat" crisis at the beginning, so i sorta rushed to turn the oven off and let the residual heat do the rest of the cooking.

2005-08-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

photo of the day: dustin hoffman surveying the damage from the explosion at 18 west 11th street (west village, nyc), the townhouse that was serving as a bomb factory for the radical sds splinter-group the weathermen. dustin lived a few houses down. march 7, 1970.

p.s.- the irony of my "weather underground" sidebar mini-banner is not lost on me.

your chokin' heart

2005-08-11T00:08:00.000-07:00

dinner
Originally uploaded by stockholm cindy.

tomatoes, tomato couscous, artichoke hearts, tofu. a recipe, you say?

hm, well, i'll tell you how i made mine; if you're using fresh ingredients for yours i can't convert the proportions and cooking times off the top of my head. i used canned tomatoes because they were already in the pantry (i know that fresh tomatoes in season can make a great dish outfuckingstanding, but i'm pretty impressed with some of the canned tomatoes that are out there). i bought jarred artichoke hearts because... ok, confession time: i'm intimidated by fresh artichokes, i've never cooked one, and they're a little expensive to just experiment with willy-nilly. if you have any advice, bring it on. i'm not too madly in love with the brine that jarred 'chokes come packed in. however, if you're a master chef like MWAH you can write a good hack for any problem, and that's the name of my game.

tomato couscous - 1 1/2 cups (uncooked)
canned tomato (stewed whole san marzano tomatoes, unseasoned) - about 4 cups
artichoke hearts (in oil) - small jar, about 8 oz.
firm tofu - about 12 oz.
dried bay leaves (two)
kosher salt, black pepper, garlic powder, ground red pepper, dried parsley (to taste)

pour the jar of artichokes (brine included) into a ziploc bag. dice the tofu and add it to the bag. seal it up and let the mixture marinate in the refrigerator for approx. 2 hours.

add a tiny bit of canola oil to a large skillet pan (i would have used olive oil but it was smelling kinda rancid and you DON'T wanna use bad oil, trust me on this). just enough to coat the bottom. heat on a low-ish flame.

take the marinade out of the fridge, pour at least 9/10 of the liquid into the sink. no matter how much you pour off, the tofu and artichokes will still retain plenty of liquid.

transfer to the pan, spread it out so everything cooks evenly. let this go for a while, adjusting seasonings along the way. you don't wanna get too neurotic about flavor yet, because we're not done adding ingredients.

give the tofu/chokes about 15-20 minutes on their own, then introduce the tomatoes. put the tomatoes in whole, and mash them gently with a fork. stir so the juice has a chance to coat the other ingredients. continue to simmer uncovered; let the majority of the excess water from the tomatoes evaporate. you can add the dried bay leaves to a remote corner of the pan while you're adding the tomatoes -- just be sure that you don't stir them in, cuz they won't soften and it'll be gross.

while there's still liquid in the pan, slowly fold in the couscous, making sure each pour gets enough heat and water. when all the couscous is in the pan, turn the heat off. leave the couscous alone so it can fluff up and absorb any leftover liquid.

do a final seasoning-adjusting, take out the bay leaves, give the pan about 15 minutes so it can cool and so the flavors have time to mingle.

i served it topped with some fava beans (sadly, no chianti was involved). i thought they tasted sorta funky, so i dunno if i'd use 'em again.

2005-08-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

Another interminable hot summer humpday. Here is some TUNEAGE to gitcha through it.

the fall - "totally wired" (superlative live version from the elephant fayre festival in cornwall, 07-29-84)
akira s et as garotas que erraram - "sobre as pernas" (from the sexual life of the savages, soul jazz's mostly very-good omnibus of são paulo, brazil's post-punk scene) (postscript: a quick look at my itunes folder reminds me that this track appeared on the similar não wave compilation too)

2005-08-07T20:12:00.000-07:00

Alert the media! Alton Brown has been updating his blog (and it's about time, sheesh). He assures viewers that even though Scripps Howard has forced the Food Network into going high-def, "Good Eats is still held together by dental floss, duct tape, peanut butter and brine."

Plus, digitaldistractions finally has torrents for the (formerly) missing season 9 episodes. My all-consuming crush can continue unabated now.

the perpetucal

2005-08-05T07:03:00.000-07:00

the perpetucal
Originally uploaded by stockholm cindy.

Matthew Perpetua should have one of these.

2005-08-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

yet another blog-meme-hoonjadoonja...

Last Road Trip - Princeton Junction, NJ to Phoenix, AZ in three days

Last Bad Advice - most of the advice i get is bad advice (i never take it)

Last Movie I Saw in a Theater - can't remember. i've hardly seen anything in a theater this year. if i saw anything, it was music-related and/or a revival of some sort.

Last TV Show Watched - a good eats rerun

Last TV Show I Enjoyed Watching - same

Last Book I Tried to Read - a pdf of julian cope's krautrocksampler

Last Thing I Left Home Without - my checkbook. i took it out of my purse earlier; there's little to no reason for it to stay in there.

Last Take Out Meal - cheese danish and coffee, yesterday morning.

Last Celebration - the night before i left tucson

Last Item Loaned Out and Haven’t Gotten Back - can't remember. usually if i loan something out i fully expect that i'll never see it again

Last New Word of a Foreign Language Learned - esphyr slobodkina

Last T-Shirt Acquired - twee-preppy; pink and white stripes, a little too tight. not really a "t-shirt" per se.

Last Package Received - a parcel post box that i sent out from tucson -- clothing and sundries

Last Web Site Visited - http://www.pbase.com/csw62/image/38272501

Last Injury - bad back from lifting heavy boxes yesterday

Last Run In with the Law - not the law, but somebody gave me a hard time last week for wanting to take a picture of their garbage

Last Place I’d Want to Live - right now, at this juncture in my life, anywhere that isn't new york

Last Physical Fight - high school

Last Magazine Read - the nation, the one with deep throat on the cover

Last Thing I Broke - my mind

Last Thing I Fixed - my camera

Last Thing That Made Me Laugh - dan perry's post about pills 'n' duct tape

Last Thought - i want to marry the version of "baby honey" on the "million tears" 12"

2005-08-04T13:50:00.000-07:00

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
A corporate lesson, December 4, 2004
Reviewer: Amanda Richards (Georgetown, Guyana) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
A very simple case study of an entrepreneur who hoped to make the Fortune 500 by vending colored headgear.

Although carefully balancing his inventory, he was still caught napping by unscrupulous bandits, and had to resort to trickery to get his investment returned.

This elementary lesson teaches the young student several things:

1. You can't sell caps at 50 cents without drawing attention to yourself.

2. Don't ever fall asleep on the job.

3. Don't monkey around in your business dealings.

4. Losing your temper can be a good thing, once it gets the desired results.

5. Returned goods can still be sold for full price if properly displayed.

A useful learning tool for the budding CEO in your family.

Amanda Richards, December 4, 2004

Edited to expand: Children can have additional fun with this book counting the hats and identifying the colors. They can also count the monkeys, and have fun acting the role of the peddlar trying to get back the caps. My son liked to pretend he was a monkey!

Was this review helpful to you? YesNo (Report this)

beef goulash

2005-08-03T16:46:00.000-07:00

beef goulash
Originally uploaded by stockholm cindy.

tonight's dinner. i made this! thanks to mom for bringing me back all that paprika from her trip to budapest.

i'll post a recipe, but i didn't really work with one -- just winged it.

Are you a mod or are you a Borneo airport?

2005-08-02T03:40:00.000-07:00

Phone booth
Originally uploaded by Hello Treacle.

Sandakan airport, Borneo. My favorite favorite favorite photo by anyone anywhere right now.

2005-07-30T08:39:00.000-07:00

And this one goes out to my girl Geeta -- sorry we never got that Burritoville before you left.

'86 Peel Session, #33 on that year's Festive Fifty, more info here.

Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle - "I Wish I Could Sprechen Sie Deutsch"

2005-07-30T03:18:00.000-07:00

given that my musical food right now is old peel broadcasts, i've been having fun re/discovering all that english twaddle i used to dismiss for not being, er, something enough. this is how it feels to be proven wrong.

2005-07-29T04:25:00.000-07:00

PHEAR my talent and desire to become a serious ~~drawer of cartoon turtles~~ urban documentary photographer. New set up on Flickr, called July 28, 2005 because that's when all this happened.

2005-07-26T09:56:00.000-07:00

Jordan sez: "Students of New York City history and typography will be pleased to know that the entrance to the E line at the World Trade Center offers three examples of pre-9/11 iconography."

Meanwhile, I'm down on Grand Street digging old New York Telephone/NYNEX stickers and reading up on how the telco biz sure has changed since 1982.

Modern Plastics of 1955

2005-07-25T19:22:00.000-07:00

Modern Plastics of 1955
Originally uploaded by scrubbles.

"Cover of the Modern Plastics Encycopedia, 1955 edition. Ass-kicking illustration by Alex Steinweiss."

2005-07-24T01:31:00.000-07:00

I'm back in New York. Got in early yesterday evening and have been pretty jetlagged since -- I've mostly been sleeping and watching the TVLand Good Times marathon (and a few SCTV episodes last night). I'm sure I won't have anything worthwhile to say for at least a few days, so I hope I'm not your only source of entertainment.

2005-07-16T04:41:00.000-07:00

Planning on flying with United Airlines soon? Know your rights (all three of 'em). Download the official United Contract of Carriage (you'll need a PDF reader). Print it out. Bring it to the airport and show it to any employee who gives you guff.

(Me, I've had mostly positive experiences flying United, except for a bomb scare at LAX, and that wasn't anyone's fault really, but the communication between crew and airport should have been much much much better organized. There was no reason why passengers should have had to wait onboard a stuffy plane for 90 minutes while it was parked safely on the tarmac and all other inbound and outbound flights were grounded. We were nowhere near the gate; where would we have run off to?)

The long hot summer continues...

2005-07-16T01:07:00.000-07:00

Getting warmer
Originally uploaded by Capital I.

I'll be back in New York next Friday, and for the rest of the year temperatures like these will be the exception rather than the rule. (It actually hasn't been a dry heat lately... unbearably humid, in fact.)

2005-07-15T03:22:00.000-07:00

too big to post in this space but well worth the click

2005-07-07T22:12:00.000-07:00

Geotagging: helping good triumph over evil.

2005-07-04T23:12:00.000-07:00

Nate Cool Out gave me the "tag, you're it" on this music list meme wotsit, and I've been procrastinating for what, two and a half weeks? There's fuck-all to do tonight, so now I have no excuse. Here goes.

Total volume of music files on my computer: My "mp3s" directory has 15.9 GB, 147 album folders, and 3,673 files. I have a few extra folders on my desktop: a "Let's All Get Crushed" mix a friend made and YSI'ed earlier this year (128 MB, 18 files), a collaborative thing called "Lars Ulrich Street Team" (570 MB, 117 files), and "unfiled music" (186 MB, 30 files), a catch-all for stray tracks that need retagging, etc.

Last CD I bought was... I honestly can't remember. The last LPs I bought were from the Salvation Army -- various private-press records by mom 'n' pop Christian groups, high school band camps, and Korean children's choirs. The last album I successfully d0wnl0@d3d was John Convertino's Ragland.

Song playing right now: Arthur Russell, "Let's Go Swimming (Arthur Gibbons Mix)"

Five songs I listen to a lot these days:

Tom Waits, "Burma Shave"
Gun Club, "St. John's Divine"
Out Hud, "Old Nude"
Bill Fay, "Garden Song"
Tuxedomoon, "I Heard It Through the Grapevine"

Now I'm supposed to pass this on to someone else... I see o.nate at Face in the Crowd hasn't done one yet! Off you go, mate.

2005-07-03T04:42:00.000-07:00

Ahh, nothing quells the boredom of a cruel summer quite like poorly produced reality television, and for that I've been turning to Beauty and the Geek. Since there's more than enough online reportage of this show (TVGasm and Television Without Pity are pretty good resources), I'll point n00bz to those and assume the rest of you have been watching right along with me. This is the part where you share in my excitement (is that the word?) that Shawn has a blog! And so does Joe, the recently eliminated shy albino with a secret love of hip-hop. Don't know much about the rest of them, although TVG and TWoP note that Lauren is (cough) an actress who sometimes turns up as an extra in other reality shows, Mindi was on her alma mater's dean's list, and that Richard (who I love with all my heart) is a recent Brandeis graduate from New Jersey.

2005-07-01T01:43:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from a feature in the new Tucson Weekly about how one city administration can royally fuck future generations in the ass.

Thirty years ago, Tucson and Portland, Ore. were looking ahead. Pima County's metropolitan population was about 450,000, and the Oregon community had more than twice as many residents. Facing growing pains, both wanted to plan their futures.

In the end, the northwest city chose urbanization; the southwest one continued suburbanization. But for a brief moment, Tucson flirted with addressing leapfrog development.

In 1972, a local Comprehensive Planning Process was begun. Combining the forces of all the governmental jurisdictions in eastern Pima County, the goal was to devise a plan based on public input which would guide growth until the year 2000, when the area was projected to have a population between 1 and 1.4 million.

Included in a 1973 newspaper supplement entitled "Tell Tucson Where to Go," these were:

-Peripheral expansion. By allowing the status quo of unrestrained population increases and scattered new housing developments to continue, it was estimated the community would grow from 260 to 750 square miles in size.

-Activity centers. Through use of intense zoning around major street intersections, commercial, office and higher-density residential uses would be concentrated at specific locations across town.

-Contained growth. Establishing and enforcing a growth boundary to encircle Tucson, this option was intended to eliminate the prevalent leapfrog pattern of development.

-Satellite cities. The towns of Oracle, Green Valley and Benson were possible candidates for huge increases in population while steps would be taken to ensure the land between them and Tucson was not developed.

When the initial draft of the 561-page plan was finally released in 1975, it sent shock waves through the Tucson establishment. The proposal recommended managing the rate of growth so the population in 2000 would not exceed 800,000 people. It also suggested having future construction only occur within a 300-square-mile area containing numerous activity centers.

In addition, the draft CPP document called for new development to pay its own way while focusing taxpayer-funded infrastructure improvements at the core of the community. Other ideas were that Central Arizona Project water not be imported into Tucson; government support for tourism and economic development would be ended, and a decreasing reliance would be placed upon the automobile.

Not surprisingly, the community's power structure was outraged. Calling the plan "dangerous" and "dictatorial," they labeled the planners who had prepared it "socialists."

2005-06-29T01:14:00.000-07:00

An ILE thread asked posters to list their interests (a banal topic, sure, but people's answers can occasionally be revealing). I shot for a list of 20 things and here's what I came up with:

01) animals (cute ones like anteaters and iguanas)
02) music (at this point more of an instinct than an "interest")
03) technology
04) urban planning/land use (& history thereof)
05) graphic design/typography
06) interior design/textiles
07) photography
08) 20th century architecture
09) thrifting/scavenging
10) food
11) travel (& history/advertising/marketing thereof)
12) language/grammar/semantics/etymology (though not as much as i used to be)
13) learning How Things Work
14) obtaining secret knowledge
15) trying to find sensible workarounds for Being Oppressed By The Man
16-20) elliott gould

2005-06-23T23:10:00.000-07:00

Let's end the week with a couple of obscuro U.K. psych mp3s from a Deram/Decca singles comp called The Psychedelic Scene. Deram was an offshoot of Decca, specializing in post-Invasion psychedelia and mod, as well as northern soul. Later on, Deram put out records by the Mo-Dettes, Kylie Minogue, and Bananarama, but The Psychedelic Scene focuses on late '60s artists, mainly with a grandiose, orchestral bent (unlike the raw noisiness of contemporaneous U.S. groups). The two songs below, "Bird Has Flown" and "Meditations," are pretty representative of the compilation as a whole. I'm also gaga over the Al Stewart track, but since I just posted "In Brooklyn" here a few weeks ago, I won't clobber you over the head with more Stewart. Unless you'd like me to. Because I'm on a big Stewart kick lately.

The Societie - "Bird Has Flown"
Felius Andromeda - "Meditations"

2005-06-23T19:29:00.000-07:00

crepe
Originally uploaded by stockholm cindy.

How is it possible that so few people know about the Flickr Chowhound group? Consider this a bit of free advertising, and for good measure, here's my picture of tonight's dinner, the Vietnamese crepe from the confusingly named Dao's Tai Pan's (446 N. Wilmot Road, Tucson). As you can see from the pic, the dish was presented beautifully, and the crepe itself had a gorgeous texture, but the fillings (a few shrimp, sliced beef, a LOT of bean sprouts) were what the Iron Chef judges call "delicate" when they're being euphemistic. The sauce served alongside was nice and made the "delicate" claim more of a real compliment, but I still thought the dish was lacking something. Subtlety can be a great thing, but the flavor should linger on your palate (and in your mind) after your plate has been bussed away.

2005-06-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

From the Department of Retarded State Laws:

I was at Fry's supermarket tonight, about to buy a bottle of $2.99 Boone's sangria (because the poor need to get wasted as much as anybody), when the cashier told me that my New York State non-driver ID wasn't a valid form of identification in Arizona. If it were an NYS driver's license, that would be okay (even though the only, and I mean only, difference between a license and a non-driver card is that one lets you drive; in New York they both require the exact same number of ID "points"). And any Arizona-issued form of ID is fine. But apparently, if you're not an Arizonan and you can't drive, and you don't carry your passport around with you wherever you go, no drinky for kitty. The funny thing is, back when I had an NYS learner's permit, I was told that a learner's permit doesn't carry the same amount of weight as a driver's license or a state ID card. So when the permit expired, and I realized that I wasn't gonna have a car any time soon, I went and got a non-driver card. End of story... until now.

The official spiel on this:

What are the acceptable forms of identification?

(1) A driver's license from any state or Canada provided it includes a picture of the licensee, (2) an Arizona identifications card issued by the Motor Vehicle Division, (3) an armed forces identification card, and (4) a valid passport or border crossing identification card issued by a government, or voter card issued by the government of Mexico which contains a photograph of the person and date of birth. ALL MUST BE UNEXPIRED. [A.R.S. 4-241(A)(1 - 4)]

I dunno man; I like Arizona and it seems like under the right circumstances this'd be a great place to live full-time, but the fates just don't want to throw "the right circumstances" my way.

2005-06-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

Today's mp3s are from Stiff Records' 1979 Akron Compilation, celebrating the best of you know what from you know where. Devo needed no help in this regard so naturally they're not on this, but lots of others are. The Waitresses and Rachel Sweet weren't famous yet ("famous," anyway), the Rubber City Rebels had yet to be produced by the Knack's Doug Fieger, and Chi Pig were many many years away from being featured on The Nomi Song's soundtrack. Some of these tracks are on the charming side of mediocre, which I mean as a compliment. All those '70s also-ran bands you hear on comps like this have a very dated quasi-commercial (but poorly produced) powerpop-punk sound, with songs that aren't quite as well-written as they're striving to be. (This is a hallmark of Stiff releases in general, with a few obvious exceptions.) That said, here are two that really grab me.

Chi Pig - "Apu-Api (Help Me)"
Jane Aire & the Belvederes - "I'm an Actress"

2005-06-13T04:15:00.000-07:00

Modular housing is BACK and there is nothing newer. Sunset magazine and Michelle Kaufmann Designs present the Sunset Breezehouse.

On the Sunset Breezehouse

* Thanks to walls of glass that fold to one side, the Breezespace completely opens to one or both courtyard gardens, making the Sunset Breezehouse’s flexible living spaces feel twice as large.—Michelle Kaufmann, Architect
* The Sunset Breezehouse represents indoor-outdoor living at its best—a subject that has long been identified with Sunset. The flexible glass walls of the Breezespace can close for an intimate breakfast or open for a grand evening gathering.—Peter Whiteley, Sunset Senior Writer
* Our objective in developing the Sunset Breezehouse with Bay Area architect Michelle Kaufmann is to provide a contemporary, outdoor-oriented, architect-designed modular home with wide market appeal. It’s a reinvented, sustainably built, Gen-X version of the modern Eichler atrium-production-house of the 1960s.—Dan Gregory, Sunset Home Editor

We are taking orders for the Sunset Breezehouse, available immediately in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho and Colorado. Your Sunset Breezehouse will arrive by flatbed truck, 90% complete, approximately 6 to 9 months after order.

2005-06-11T20:29:00.000-07:00

Mid-June favorites:

1) Campbell's Chunky Tantalizin' Turkey Chili With Beans (what kind of loser eats "no beans" chili anyway?), in the can, served cold.
2) cantilevered architecture
3) hiking out past the city limits
4) Big Lots! (a discount store with class, sorta, plus they have cheap cast iron skillets!)
5) this dinosaur