greg.org – Page 199 – the making of, by greg allen

The SA-60 Spherical Airship

According to BoingBoing, the Sierra Nevada Corporation’s been testing its SA-60 Spherical Airship at the Reno-Stead Airport. [SNC’s the same company whose surveillance blimp was set to be mooned this month by 1,500 hundred angry Canadians in the quiet border downs of Sarnia/Port Huron. I think high winds scuttled the ballooning, and hence, the mooning.]
The SA-60 [above] was first demonstrated successfully in 2004 by a knot of gruff-sounding defense contractors–none of whose domain names work anymore. At the time, the manned, operational version–suitable for use “for both defense and homeland security purposes including surveillance of battlefields and domestic borders and ports.”–was expected to have a diameter of 76 feet. An unmanned, solar-powered version would have a diameter of 200 feet.
Since I’ve got my hands full turning satelloons and other fantastic, spherical balloon airships into art, I hope someone else will pick up the slack and start celebrating the glorious poetry that is the military industrial complex press release. God Bless America!:

Press Release: July 1, 2004
SNC Enters Exclusive Partnership with Proxity Digital Networks Subsidiary
Cyber Aerospace and Techsphere Systems on Spherical Airship
Sparks, Nevada – (July 1, 2004) – Sierra Nevada Corporation announced today that it has entered into an exclusive partnership agreement with Proxity Digital Networks subsidiary Cyber Aerospace and Techsphere Systems to provide technology, payload and sensor integration for government and commercial end users of the SA-60 Spherical Airship.
Proxity Digital Networks, Inc. and Techsphere Systems International, Inc., recently announced through Cyber Aerospace Corp., an operating subsidiary of Proxity’s On Alert Systems, that the SA-60 low altitude surveillance airship has flown at 10,000 feet altitude with a payload exceeding 500 pounds, thus satisfying all flight criteria required under existing contracts. The 10,000 ft. flight took place as Cyber Aerospace conducted contractor demonstration flights for the U.S. Navy at Captain Walter Francis Duke Regional Airport in Hollywood, St. Mary’s County, MD.

Continue reading “The SA-60 Spherical Airship”

While We’re On The Subject Of Polished Metal Objects: Walter De Maria

And speaking of conceptually loaded minimalist objects of precision-crafted metal, here are a couple of early Walter de Maria works I was looking at a few months back:

Betty Freeman bought Melville [1967, above] in 1968. It’s a polished, book-sized tablet of stainless steel engraved with the opening lines from Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence Man:

At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.
His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger.

As Christie’s noted when they sold Melville last May [$266,500, including premium], de Maria began producing industrially finished stainless steel sculptures in 1965, with the aid of collector Robert Scull. In 1966, he made Instrument for LaMonte Young , a 3 x 5 x 36 aluminum box with contact mics and an amplifier built in to pick up the sound of a metal ball rolling along inside the channel. Freeman picked that up in 1970. [And Christie’s sold it for $80,500.]

The early de Maria metal sculpture I’ve been most interested in over the years, though, is a little, 1-ft metal bar, an edition, which is engraved with a restriction that it can never be sold for more than $100. I first saw one in a collector’s loft in SoHo around 1992, and I’ve waited ever since for one to turn up for sale somewhere. So far, no. Go figure.

Making The Scene With Le Grand K

Turns out the IPK is on the cover of one of Andy‘s favorite books, The Best Book Designs 1997, designed by Simon Davies:

Also, from Metric Views, a blog of “commentary about the British measurement muddle,” a PDF of “Standard Kilogram Weights – A Story of Precision Fabrication,” an article by Johnson Mathey’s F.J. Smith, published in the 1973 issue of Platinum Metals Review. Of the 1889 First General Conference of Weights and Measures where the IPK was officially adopted, he wrote with metallurgic confidence:

The kilogram was redefined arbitrarily in terms of the new International Prototype Kilogram so that our present standard of mass has a permanence dependent only upon the stability of the iridium-platinum alloy.

Since then, Johnson Matthey “has been called upon regularly to supply” national prototypes and working standards, objects of extraordinary craftsmanship and exquisite, minimalist form, which will soon be obsolete.
Just like this original platinum kilogram standard, a sister to the Kilogramme des Archives, fabricated in 1795 by Marc Etienne Janety, a former goldsmith to the court at Versailles:

Similarly, historically speaking, a meter was measured against a one-meter rod–THE one-meter rod–first fabricated out of platinum, then, after 1889 executed in a globally distributed edition of 30 rods of iridium-platinum alloy, which:

Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum-iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place. Otherwise art is only show and monkey business.

Donald Judd wrote that about his project in Marfa in 1987. The meter was redefined in 1983as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second. The show and monkey business continues undisturbed.

The International Prototype Kilogram, Or Le Grand K

Caught this on the CBC last night. I always assumed a kilogram is equal to the mass of a liter of water. But it turns out to be messy/tricky/complicated to measure water accurately enough, plus, some scientists decided to change the definition soon after it was decreed, so a kilogram is actually equal to the mass of the kilogram, the International Prototype Kilogram, or IPK, also known in France as Le Grand K. It’s the only unit of measure, says Wikipedia, “that is still defined in relation to an artifact rather than to a fundamental physical property that can be reproduced in different laboratories.”

The IPK is made of a platinum alloy known as “Pt‑10Ir”, which is 90% platinum and 10% iridium (by mass) and is machined into a right-circular cylinder (height = diameter) of 39.17 mm to minimize its surface area. The addition of 10% iridium improved upon the all-platinum Kilogram of the Archives [originally made and adopted in 1799. -ed.] by greatly increasing hardness while still retaining platinum’s many virtues: extreme resistance to oxidation, extremely high density, satisfactory electrical and thermal conductivities, and low magnetic susceptibility. The IPK and its six sister copies are stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in an environmentally monitored safe in the lower vault located in the basement of the BIPM’s Chateau de Breteuil in Sèvres on the outskirts of Paris. Three independently controlled keys are required to open the vault. Official copies of the IPK were made available to other nations to serve as their national standards. These are compared to the IPK roughly every 50 years.

The IPK is stored under three bell jars, and its six sister copies are each stored under two.

The IPK and two other cylinders were manufactured in 1879 by Johnson Matthey, assayers and refiners for the Bank of England. [IPK is the third, KIII.] Johnson Matthey made 40 replicas in 1884, which were calibrated to IPK. 34 were distributed in 1889 to signatories of the Meter Convention for use as national standards. Two of this original batch, K4 and K20, are in the US. K20 was designated the US ~~standard~~ prototype in 1889.
The process and protocols for comparing these replicas to IPK, known as “periodic verification,” have evolved over the years. The BIPM was apparently not so distracted between 1939 and 1946 that they couldn’t develop “The BIPM Cleaning Method,” which involves a chamois, ether, ethanol, and steam cleaning with bi-distilled water. [Considering the Metric system itself was implemented in the midst of the French Revolution, and proceeded even as key scientists were being guillotined, I guess it’s not so surprising.] Models have developed to describe the rate of surface contamination.

What has become clear after the third periodic verification performed between 1988 and 1992 is that masses of the entire worldwide ensemble of prototypes have been slowly but inexorably diverging from each other. It is also clear that the mass of the IPK lost perhaps 50 µg over the last century, and possibly significantly more, in comparison to its official copies.

Given this variation and divergence, much of which cannot be explained, the CIPM [Committee &c.] in 2005 recommended redefining the kilogram as a constant of nature. So far, a suitably stable, reproducible constant has eluded metrologists.
One method is to define the number of carbon-12 atoms in a 1kg cube. Another, part of the Avogadro Project, is to create a single-crystal sphere of silicon, then measure the sphere radius and its internal crystal lattice with interferometry, and then polish it with single atomic level-accuracy to reach 1 kg. A sample is presented here with rather dramatic flair by a master optician at the Australian Centre for Precision Optics:

Its appearance might look familiar to regular readers of this website.
The human attempt to account for the world through exacting science results in a minimalist object that transcends other Minimalist objects, all while inhabiting a conceptual framework that transcends Conceptualist frameworks.
And I want some. And when I get my kilogram[s], I’ll put them on the shelf next to my satelloons and my photos of the entire universe from the Palomar Sky Survey.
Kilogram, Grave [wikipedia]
photos of the International Prototype Kilogram [bipm.org]
“The kilogram and measurements of mass and force,” Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Jan-Feb, 2001 [findarticles.com, PDF original at nist.gov]

Pedro Friedeberg, “Hairless Hearts Of Some Hairy Nuns”

My step-father bought this crazy Pedro Friedeberg painting in 1966 in Mexico City. It’s ink and paint on board, and the title is Hairless Hearts Of Some Hairy Nuns.
Here’s a large detail of the central rooster, who is saying “Pseudo-Cybernetics.”

Friedeberg is an esoteric, dada-esque, surrealist probably best known for his large, hand-shaped chairs. He seems like quite a character, sort of a Mexican Dali making spritist Vasarelys.
Hairless Hearts… was included in an exhibition at the Antonio Souza Gallery organized as a cultural sidebar to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
Here is a list of the other paintings in the show:

“A Machine Made to Frighten Tailors (Also Can Be Used To Slice Water)”
“Luis XIV’s Discotheque”
“Tehuana Orphanage”
“Confessions of An Iconoclastic Sea-Urchin”
“Madame De Pompadour’s Electric Chair”
“The Aristocrats’ Lighthouse”
“The Head of “Chez Twiggy,” An Old Peoples’ Home, In Her Pseudo-Cybernetics Style Uniform, ORders The Immediate Expulsion Of All False Optimists, In Inverse Alphabetical Order”
“Good Morning, Miss Watermelon”
“The Pockmarked Czarina Becomes Indignant Over The Statistics Presented By The Minister of Oceans And Clouds During A Round-Table Discussion On Eskimo Astrology At The Congress of Natural and Applied Pornography”
Left Hand of the Viceroy Gumersidno Sirloin and The Hand of His Niece The Disreputable Marchioness Brujulilla De Bourbon”
“Paganini’s Bath”
“What We Found In Aristotle’s Pyjamas”
“Orphanage for Squint-Eyed Children Sponsored By Baron Von Pipian”
“Socrates’ Garbage Pail”
“An Hermaphrodite Baby Elephant Learning Russian”
“Afternoon Outing Of Little Beige Riding Hood”

And The Company That’ll Bring It To You: AT&T

Maybe it’s just me who figured at the time, everyone was caught up in the giddy, optimistic hype of the World’s Fair. I guess I hadn’t counted on E.B. White. His nonplussed review of the 1939 New York World’s Fair is included in Essays of E.B. White. Here’s the best part [of the fair, that is. The whole essay’s a short, pleasant read]:

Another gay spot, to my surprise, was the American Telephone & Telegraph Exhibit. It took the old Telephone Company to put on the best show of all. To anyone who draws a lucky number, the company grants the privilege of making a long-distance call. This call can be to any point in the United States, and the bystanders have the exquisite privilege of listening in through earphones and of laughing unashamed. To understand the full wonder of this, you must reflect that there are millions of people who have never either made or received a long-distance call, and that when Eddie Pancha, a waiter in a restaurant in El Paso, Texas, hears the magic words “New York is calling…go ahead, please,” he is transfixed in holy dread and excitement. I listened for two hours and ten minutes to this show, and I’d be there this minute if I were capable of standing up. I had the good luck to be listening at the earphone when a little boy named David Wagstaff won the toss and put in a call to his father in Springfield, Mass., what a good time he was having at the World’s Fair. David walked resolutely to the glass booth before the assembled kibitzers and in a tiny, timid voice gave the operator his call, his little new cloth hat set all nicely on his head. But his father wasn’t there, and david was suddenly confronted with the necessity of telling his story to a man named Mr. Henry, who happened to answer the phone and who, pn hearing little David Wagstaff’s voice calling from New York, must surely have thought that David’s mother had been run down in the BMT and that David was doing the manly thing.
“Yes, David,” he said, tensely.
“Tell my father this, began Dvid, slowly, carefully, determined to go through with the halcyon experience of winning a lucky call at the largest fair the world had yet produced.
“Yes, David.”
“We got on the train, and…and…had a nice trip, and at New Haven, when they were taking off the car and putting another car on, it was awfully funny because the car gave a great–big–BUMP!”
Then followed David’s three minute appreciation of the World of Tomorrow and the Citadel of Light, phrased in the crumbling remnants of speech that little boys are left with when a lot of people are watching, and when their thoughts begin to run down, and when Perispheres begin to swim mistily in time. Mr. Henry–the invisible and infinitely surprised Mr. Henry–maintained a respectful and indulgent silence. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I would swap the Helicline for a copy of his attempted transcription of David’s message to his father.

“The World of Tomorrow” was originally published in May 1939 in The New Yorker.

Rethinking Ai Weiwei, Who Was Just Detained And Beaten By Chinese Security

I’ve never thought much of Ai Weiwei’s work; despite some of its undeniable power, he’d been compared to Warhol a few too many times for me to take him seriously. Well, it’s time for me to rethink that.
First and second, there was Ai’s refreshing seriousness and political boldness as a counterpoint to the apparent insufferable Japanese superciliousness [Hiroshi Sugimoto, I’ve been a fan for 15 years, but I’m looking squarely at you here] at the opening of his exhibition at the Mori Art Museum at Roppongi Hills. From Philip Tinari’s report for Artforum:

Artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, like Ai a self-taught architect, closed the day’s events with a lengthy encomium to his own recent projects, including a museum he designed and the first show–“naturally of my own work”–to be staged there. “Will there be a second show?” Ai rejoined.
Not surprisingly, the conversation often came back to Ai’s recent brush with the law that led to the closure of his much-loved blog in early June. He jovially recounted a tale of calling the Caochangdi village police station to report the secret agents who were staking out his home and studio and who refused to show him their badges. (One of the plainclothes turned out to be the brother of the local patrolman–so much for that plan.) Many speculate that the troubles owed ultimately to the “citizen’s investigation”–staffed by volunteers and mobilized via his blog–that canvassed the Sichuan disaster zone throughout the spring, collecting names and vital statistics on fifty-one hundred of the earthquake’s youngest victims. For Ai, the unresolved carnage–60 percent of parents have not been able to reclaim their children’s remains–owes much to shoddy school construction, and thus to party corruption. Under this pressure, the government released a figure of 5,335 dead schoolchildren just before the one-year anniversary of the May 12 quake. Asked point-blank by architect Shigeru Ban why he bothered to pursue this seemingly self-destructive personal campaign, Ai looked around at the hundreds of eyes fixed on him and replied bluntly, “If I don’t use my social privilege to do this, I feel ashamed.”

Wow, Shigeru Ban, I hope that wasn’t as bad as it sounds.
Now the AP reports that Ai and several other activists for earthquake victims were detained and “roughed up” by police in the Chinese city of Chengdu, in order to prevent them from attending and testifying at a trial of another earthquake protestor, Tan Zuoren. Tan, Ai, and others pushed for nearly a year to force the government to release the names of over 5,000 schoolchildren killed in last year’s quake.
I can’t think of another artist of Ai’s prominence–he was credited with the idea for Herzog & deMeuron’s Bird Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics–who has put himself and his reputation on the line politically to such an extent. It’s remarkable, but it also makes me wonder just what the comparable artist and political issue would be here.
Eye for an Ai [artforum]
Chinese police detain supporters of quake critic [ap/google via artforum]

Putting The Fun In Fundraising–With Facebook!

Hah, Michael Govan’s kickback public engagement in LACMA’s decision to suspend its film program surprised me, but not as much as seeing the museum basically organizing its own netroots opposition.
Now, barely ten days into the LACMA Film Program Deathwatch, The LA Times hears from a vacationing Govan that “potential donors have stepped up, interested in helping underwrite the series.” the whole crisis starts to feel like a manufactured fundraising stunt.
The Times has all the pieces of the story, but can’t seem to put them together.
Govan had the film program on a three-year sink-or-swim timeline, which runs out now. The museum president said continued funding of the film department has been “an issue” in budget discussions for seven years, which means the board has been interested enough to keep the department around, but that the status quo hasn’t been sexy enough to attract dedicated funding.
By floating the idea of killing–sorry, “suspending”–the program, the museum is able to gauge the public’s interest. On the off chance that no one cared, the tough budget decision would be that much easier to justify. Meanwhile, an outcry–the louder the better–would bring attention to the program, and would transform a mundane $5 million ask for operating funds into an exciting chance to save and expand a vital, beloved film program. The naming rights of which can be had for–how much would you like, Michael? “I’d love to see $10 million.”
LACMA’s Govan says donors step forward for film program [latimes]
Previously: On LACMA killing its film program to save it

You Didn’t Have To Be There, And Even If You Had

It’s now known as “Theater Piece No. 1,” and it is considered to be the first multimedia happening. It included simultaneous solos of dance, poetry readings and a lecture, along with slides, film, painting, and phonographic recordings.
But if John Cage called it anything at all, or if anyone referred to it as anything at all–and it’s not clear that anyone did at the time–it was just 1952 Untitled Event at Black Mountain College. And no one can quite agree how long it lasted, or even when it actually took place, but the best guess is probably early August, maybe on the 16th, in 1952.
The most complete synthesis of documentation and recollections of the event is probably William Fetterman’s 1996 book, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces, which says that only around 35-50 people–including faculty, students, and locals–attended.
There was reportedly? probably? no score at the time, but that wasn’t a big shock to longtime Cage collaborators like David Tudor: “He distributes a plan that you can use or not, but it’s just a piece of papers with some numbers on it. This kind of thing doesn’t get documented, and it gets lost.” Cage created the first of two complex scores for “Theater Piece No. 1” in 1960.
Here’s how Cage himself remembered it in 19:

At one end of the rectangular hall, the long end, was a movie, and at the other were slides. I was on a ladder delivering a lecture which included silences, and there was another ladder which M.C. Richards and Charles Olson went up at different times… Robert Rauschenberg was playing an old-fashioned phonograph that had a horn, and David Tudor was playing piano, and Merce Cunningham and other dancers were moving through the audience. Rauschenberg’s pictures [the White Paintings] were suspended above the audience…They were suspended at various angles, a canopy of paintings above the audience. I don’t recall anything else except the ritual of the coffee cup. (Kirby and Scheckner 1965, pp. 52-3)

The movie, black and white silent footage of a work in progress by Nicholas Cernovitch, was apparently projected on the ceiling, and then it moved down the wall. Scenes included the setting sun, and the cooks at BMC, a couple named Cornelia and George. Who, I would assume, lived in the house Lawrence Kocher designed for the kitchen staff.
There is at least one recollection that the event also included a black & white painting by Franz Kline. I’m on the road, so I don’t have my copy of Hopps’s Rauschenberg in the 1950s catalogue handy, but I remember a dispute over whether Rauschenberg’s all-white paintings were considered or used as projection screens for the event’s multimedia components. Cage credited the White Paintings with prodding him to compose 4’33”.

Cernovitch summed up the various audience reactions rather succinctly: “Nobody knew we were creating history.”
And they weren’t, at least until Cage began teaching the event at his legendary New School classes several years later to students who would be among the first performance artists, including Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, and Al Hansen.
Buy Fetterman’s John Cage’s Theatre Pieces [amazon]
Or preview most of the account of 1952 Untitled Event, beginning on page 97 [google books]
[image: Bob at Stable Gallery in 1953, by Allan White for LIFE]

Dim Bulbs

I’d ignored Artforum’s recap of the recent Süddeutsche Zeitung report that the EU’s looming ban might pose a problem for museums and artists whose work incorporates. incandescent lightbulbs. I mean, it seems like such a piddly little question, right?
Sure, artists from Moholy-Nagy to Dan Flavin to Robert Rauschenberg to Felix Gonzalez-Torres used light bulbs, I thought [and don’t try and factcheck me on Flavin; I’m talking about his early wall-mounted constructs.] But the hefty fines are only for selling light bulbs. Just buy the things out of the EU, or have someone give them to you, problem solved, right?
Wrong. According to the followup story, the light bulb ban includes importation, too. So depending on the wattage, conservators and collectors have a narrowing window in which to stockpile a crapload of light bulbs, the way they do Beuysian chocolate, fat, and felt. [For Felix’s light strings, most of which use 25w bulbs, the ban doesn’t kick in until 2012. You could fill a warehouse with light bulbs by then, no sweat.] What’ll be interesting to see is whether loaning or selling a light-bulb equipped work constitutes importation, and is thus banned.
Actually, what’s interesting to see is the complete and utter histrionic ignorance of the EU Energy Commission spokesman Ferran Tarradellas [Espuny] when asked about the issue:

Tarradellas questioned the argument that lightbulbs are as common to the artist’s materials as canvas, paint, and marble. “A visit to any museum for contemporary art demonstrates the contrary,” said Tarradellas.
…
“It’s utterly ludicrous to ask the commission for the sake of art to leave a product on the market that could be dangerous for the environment, health, and the consumer,” said Tarradellas. “Otherwise exceptions could be asked for when an artist wants to use antiperson landmines, enriched plutonium, or CFC.”

Ah, well since you put it that way…
The original article, which Artforum never bothers to link to: Glühbirnen in Museen | Dealer gesucht [sueddeutsche.de]
The followup does not appear to be online [yet?]

Aluminaire House: The Making And Remaking Of

Haha, It only took ten days the first time. When Wallace K Harrison reassembled Kocher and Frey’s Aluminaire House on his property in Huntington, LI, after buying it for $1000 and taking it apart in a matter of hours, it took a lot longer and cost a lot more. That was due, “in part because the components for the house were left outdoors and a strong rain washed away the identifying chalk markings, leaving a jigsaw puzzle to be put back together.” Ultimately, the structural integrity was compromised, and anyway, Harrison soon added onto and moved and later even partially buried what he called the “tin house.”
That’s all according to the 1999 revised edition of Joseph Rosa’s Albert Frey, Architect, which is on Google Books.
Rosa also gives some hint as to the house’s structure and materials, none of which sound like they’d pass muster with a building department today:

the whole thing rested on six five-in. aluminum columns attached to aluminum and steel channel girders.
the “battle deck-pressed steel flooring” was sandwiched with insulation board and linoleum.
the non-loadbearing walls are “narrow-ribbed aluminum,” insulation board, and building paper, “joined by washers and screws.”
the dining room and living room were separated by a glass&steel china cabinet, a retractable rubber-top dining table, and the risers for the shower cantilevered from the bed/bath overhead.
the balcony was lined with concrete-asbestos brick.

Fantastic, but seriously crazy. The only way you could logically cantilever a shower over a living room is if it has glass walls. Which sounds like something Paul Rudolph would do, or probably did.

Yesterday And Tomorrow In Aluminaire House News

So sweet. Check out this awesome aluminum-clad house, which curator/architectural historian Erik Neil spotted yesterday on the campus of the NY Institute of Technology:

I looked it up on the Internet, and found this post, which I wrote last weekend. It’s Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey’s Aluminaire House as it exists today, or yesterday, anyway, which is pretty damn close.
This house is completely fantastic. Who’d have thought that looking like a 1930’s industrial refrigerator would result in such wonderful architecture? Put some quilting on those aluminum panels, and it’d be like living at Florent.
Neil visited the house because he’s including it “Arcadia to Suburbia: Architecture on Long Island 1930-2010,” an exhibition on the history of modernism on Long Island set to open in January at the Hecksher Museum in Huntington.
He also pointed out that Joe Rosa, who was a key player in saving the Aluminaire House from demolition in the 1980s, included it in his 1990 monograph, Albert Frey, Architect, which I have somewhere in storage, but which I might sell just on principle because–hello–it’s like $115-$581 on Amazon right now. Crazy days.

DDOS Cannot Silence Awesome Christopher Hawthorne LiveTweet

LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne delivered a mordantly hilarious stream of live Twitter updates from a Sci-Arc panel discussion last night. I’ll be damned if I can comment on it, and I’m not sure I can even link to it all, but it is awesome.
The show started with Anthony Vidler talking old-school Freudian smack–complete with accent–about Schindler/Neutra, Neutra/Schindler, or vice versa. And then he moderated a “architects in LA”-type discussion among Hitoshi Abe, Peter Cook, Eric Owen Moss, Thom Mayne, Peter Noever, and Wolf Prix.
My favorite is right toward the end *SPOILER ALERT*: “The philosophical–not to mention gen.–homogeneity of panel is astounding. Guess that was predictable, but still. Hoping Hitoshi Abe can……rescue us from Boomer avant-gardism.”
Help me, Hitoshi Abe, you’re LA’s only hope. I hope Sci-Arc puts this thing on YouTube…
Schindler / Neutra, Neutra / Schindler; L.A. / Wien: On the Couch [sciarc.edu]

Make The Motorcycles Run On Time

When you watch this 1950s newsreel footage of an [the?] Italian police motorcycle drill team, turn off the music [it’s not original anyway] and instead, just make motorcycle noises, and occasional exclamations of “Mama mia!” and “Magnifico!” maybe slip in a little reflexive, “Il Duce!” or two for old time’s sake. [via anonymous works]

In Memory Of

Harry Patch had a bustling career as one of the last living British WWI veterans. He was the last soldier to fight in the trenches. He died on July 25 at 111, just a couple of weeks after fellow veteran and oldest man in the world for a month Henry Allingham passed away at 113.
There are three known WWI veterans still alive: one British seaman living in Australia one American, and one Canadian.
But Patch’s archetypal trench warfare experience, combined with his lucid memory and firm convictions about the horrible wrongness of war, made him the most celebrated. When the BBC tracked him down for an interview in 1998, it turns out Patch hadn’t talked to anyone about his war experience at all. In 80 years. The BBC made a documentary about Patch called The Last Tommy in 2005, and then another documentary of Patch meeting with a 107-year-old German veteran in 2007.
In 2008, Patch’s autobiography, The Last Fighting Tommy, as told to Richard Van Emden, came out. Here’s a video of Van Emden promoting the book:

Then England’s poet laureate wrote a poem about Patch which the, what, composer laureate? set to music. All but a handful of the 79 Harry Patch YouTube videos right now are posthumous tributes. And now Radiohead has released a song, “Harry Patch (In Memory Of).”

In his interview Van Emden acknowledges the quirks of fate that made The Last Tommy a lucid, powerful rememberer, not someone else, a senile symbol. But he still said that while Patch was alive; now he’s gone, and his memories with him. All we’re left with are stories, which are not the same thing.
I didn’t know or even try to know whether there were still people with a firsthand memory of the brutal trench warfare of WWI when I began making Souvenir (November 2001), about the Battle of the Somme. [Patch fought at Passchendaele, not the Somme.] There were few enough veterans for my purpose, which was to see a site of horrific death and destruction after all the people who remembered it had disappeared.
I’ve left these threads alone for a while, but lately, as I’ve been plugging ahead on other installments of the Souvenir Series, I’ve had the urge to follow them again. As it turns out, a collection of essays was published in January on this very subject. War Memory and Popular Culture: Essays on Modes of Remembrance and Commemoration includes “The Ninetieth Anniversary of The Battle of The Somme,” by Dan Todman, a military historian at the University of London whose blog is named Trench Fever.
It’s the absence of firsthand rememberers that frames Todman’s whole survey of the contours of “memory”:

Here, then, are four problematic areas: how to define “memory: how it works for individuals and groups; the relationship between history, memor, family, and trauma in the production of ideas about the unlived past; and possible explanations for the “memory boom.”
…
The 2006 anniversary is a particularly useful one for considerations of what memory and “memory” mean, in both popular and academic terms. Ceremonies in Britain and in France and the media reporting of them made frequent references to the need to “remember the battle and those who had died during it. But the number of those who could actually do so was now extremely limited. The commemorations in 2006 were the first major anniversary at which no veteran of the 1916 battle was present.

Buy War Memory and Popular Culture: Essays on Modes of Remembrance and Commemoration at Amazon; I just did. [amazon]