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Dom Garcia

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À Blois, jusque dans les années 90, les habitants pouvaient sentir dans les airs l’odeur du chocolat annonçant la pluie. Auguste Poulain avait édifié en pleine ville son usine historique qui  constituait  un point d’inertie au cœur de la ville, entre le château de François  Ier et le quartier  de la gare. Érigée dès la fin du XIXe siècle, la fabrique de  chocolat s’étendait sur  4 hectares quand elle a fermé ses portes en 1992, à  l’issue d’un transfert en  périphérie. Un fleuron industriel considéré comme  une « verrue » par les élus  locaux, la CCI et le maire de l’époque (J.Lang).

Plus de 15 millions d’euros ont été dépensés pour ce déménagement et la destruction d’une grande partie des bâtiments historiques.

Dans le sillage de l’usine Poulain, toute la zone entre la gare et le château, haut lieu du tourisme dans la vallée de la Loire à été rénovée et « nettoyée » des vieilleries architecturales. Un Institut Universitaire de Technologie et une Ecole Nationale Supérieure du paysage se sont installés.

Plus de photographies de Blois ici : http://www.fotolog.com/sayf avec la série “Dormitorium”.

Visible maintenant depuis l’autoroute A10, à l’approche de Blois, l’usine Poulain s’étire parallèlement aux voies en une longue et horrible bande noire métallique.
Jean Nouvel, architecte de renom a l’habitude de déconcerter et de séduire mais son travail à Blois (réalisé en 1991) est un raté de grande ampleur qui répond à une opération bâclée et au budget manifestement « serré ».

Heureusement, il nous reste le souvenir des belles années chocolat avec ces deux vidéos/pépites trouvées dans les archives de l’INA…
Enjoy ! ^_^

Martha Camarillo has documented the phenomena first in a Life magazine cover story.

“Fletcher Street’s riding community has been a part of the Philadelphia community for over 100 years. For many of those years, Fletcher Street was part of a larger urban horse community that numbered in over 50 stables throughout Philadelphia. Today, it is well known that the area surrounding Fletcher Street has increasingly struggled with unemployment and drugs overtaking the community; the men and boys of Fletcher Street have in turn struggled to maintain their horses, stables and way of life as conditions have become increasingly difficult.”

“The mission of The Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club is to save and restore this historical, important facet of Philadelphia’s community, and most importantly, its children. Fletcher Street’s horse community is for many children, the only safe place to be mentored, to feel good about themselves, to learn important lessons in responsibility, discipline and reward. Many of the boys that frequent Fletcher Street have little to no support in life and the men on Fletcher Street have consistently taken it upon themselves to provide a positive environment and some facet of stability for those kids that have none. Fletcher Street is determined to preserve its legacy, children and horses.”

Wow ! check the Cowboys of Philly, wearing sneakers on horseback with names like : Red Pony, Champ, Power, White Chick, One Eye and Easy Like Sunday Morning, riding through dilapidated hoods, hookin’ up abandoned houses as stables, provide the unique window into Fletcher street’s brotherhood.
Horses are like their owners, have their own cruel experiences, many of them saved from low-end auctions and slaughterhouses, but now, they are Diamonds in the rough ! ^_^

Fletcher Street book available from Powerhouse Books…

Martha Camarillo is a photographer from Texas. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Life, The Telegraph, Numéro, Journal, i-D, and many others. Her first book, Remote Photos (Janvier/Léo Scheer, 2005), a collaboration with artist Avena Gallagher, was an in-depth look at the identity of teenage male and female models, made by giving the models themselves disposable cameras to be used by whomever they saw fit. Work from the project was exhibited at Léo Scheer Gallery, Paris, in 2005. Camarillo was the winner of the Hyères Festival 2001, and the 2002 Art Director’s Award.

Source : www.fletcherstreeturbanridingclub.com
Plus : www.pennsylvaniaequestrian.com

Cover of the book, Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles by François Chastanet (click here for a look inside ).

Heller: What is Cholo writing?

Chastanet: The term cholo derives from an Aztec word xolotl meaning ‘dog’ that was later turned on its head and used as a symbol of pride by the Mexican-American community in the context of the ethnic power movements of the 1960s, from which emerged the idea of La Raza or Chicano nationalism (e.g., Brown Berets in Watsonville). Cholo writing originally constitutes the vernacular handstyle created by the Mexican gangs in Los Angeles as far back as the 1940s: a neglected phenomenon that has a specific place in the history and development of the urban graffiti of the Western world, it is probably the oldest form of the “graffiti of names” in the 20th century, with its own aesthetic, evident long before the explosion in the early 1970s in New York. Cholo writing or placas can be seen as cousins of the baroque gothic calligraphies typical of Mexico, as a genuine expression of a border culture between Mexico and the United States. It has had a major influence on the visual expressions of Californian popular culture, including the lowrider, surf, skate and hip-hop movements.

The book Cholo Writing explores the genesis of these specific letterforms that paradoxically gave a visual identity to Los Angeles’ infinite banal suburbia. For the first time ever a historical series of photographs from the early 1970s in L.A. is presented together with a contemporary collection, which gives a unique insight in the history of Cholo writing from an aesthetic point of view. Howard Gribble, an amateur photographer from the city of Torrance in the south of Los Angeles County, documented Latino gang graffiti from 1970 to 1975 with the simultaneous idea of “portraying the city.” These black-and-white photographs, frontal visual recordings of various Cholo handletterings, constituted an unique opportunity to try to push forward the calligraphic analysis of Cholo writing, its origins and formal evolution.

Heller: What are the messages in this form of graffiti? Are there any “stars” of gang graffiti, or is it meant to be anonymous?

Chastanet: The gang culture is a truly simultaneous phenomenon of the suburban Californian dream. Latino gangs are a parallel reality of the local urban life, with their own traditions and codes – from oral language, way of dressing, tattoos and hand signs to letterforms. Without ignoring the violence and self-destruction inherent to la vida loca (or “the crazy life,” referring to the barrio gang experience), one needs to document the visual strategies of this subculture to survive as a visible entity in a suburban environment. These inscriptions have a totally different function than what we call graffiti nowadays, i.e., tags representing individuals’ nicknames mainly (usually with additional crew names associated with them). These wall-writings, sometimes called the “newspaper of the streets,” are territorial signs whose main function is to define clearly and constantly the geographic limits of a gang’s influence area and encourage gang strength, a graffiti made “by the neighborhood, for the neighborhood.” Writing a group’s name makes it immortal. The image stays while the carnage between gangs continues—name writing has always been closely linked to death and memory. So, in Cholo writing the image of the name of the gang is at the heart of the writing practice. Most of gang members produce graffiti but at different levels: in each gang there are lettering specialists, usually one skilled writer writes for the whole group for large inscriptions, and some guys are genuine lettering experts, both today and in the past.

Roll call of names in Cholo writing, c. 1970s. (photo: Howard Gribble)

Heller: There appears to be a lot of references to gothic and inscriptional lettering. Is this studied on the part of the gang members, or naïve? Are there any rules governing Cholo, whether artistic or territorial?

Chastanet: Everything but naïve. How we make things, how we represent ourselves, how we display our name in that case: the style tells who we are. Drawing letters is a practice where identity and origin questions are essential. Cholo inscriptions has a specific written aesthetic based on a strong sense of the place and on a monolinear adaptation of historic black letters for street bombing. There are very precise calligraphic codes, constant through time and different generations of gang members, even if continuous evolutions appear. To represent their name with the maximum aura and “officialdom” Chicano writers have chosen since the 1960s (and even probably before) black letters like Engravers Old English or Goudy Text Old Style (mainly in uppercases) appearing in all sorts of official printed ephemera of that time (like school diplomas, birth certificates, etc.) to create the classic Cholo handstyle. Lettering manuals like Speedball Textbook for Pen & Brush Lettering by Ross F. George—his work appears in the Speedball Lettering catalogues from the 1930s and ’40s—seem also to be obviously known by some Los Angeles gang writers. In the Mexican community gothic calligraphy consciously communicate tradition, taking the written name to a certain degree of importance, to an almost religious level. What is impressive is to see that this style has a kind of geographic homogeneity through Los Angeles county even if each gang, each territory tries to have its own “corporate” identity through lettering details inside the Cholo script rules.

Detail of Cholo writing, c. 1970s. (photo: Howard Gribble)

Heller: The look of Cholo writing is decidedly different from East Coast and European graffiti, in part because it’s monochrome rather than chromatic. Why is this?

Chastanet: Los Angeles gang graffiti is much older than what we see as normal or regular graffiti today, which are variants around the New York model of tags (based on the gestural signature aesthetic), throw-ups (quick efficient bubble letters) and pieces (based on comics lettering with highly colored inside surfaces, outlines and background). To the contrary, Cholo writing and placas are traditionally black. This is mainly due to the fact that their influence is based on typographic headlines and titles from newspapers for example, mainly black prints. At the same time, their ambition is not decorative but mainly functional, it is clearly a tool for gangs to create a simple, efficient and legible signage system. Nevertheless, nowadays you can see more places written with all sort of colors; white or silver are occasionally used on walls with dark backgrounds for better visibility of course. Their lettering culture is much closer to epigraphy, in a way, no ligatures between signs. Since the beginning of the 1980s a kind of New York style of graffiti—(mainly individual and going all-city, not confined to the neighborhood/turf limits—started to appear in Los Angeles streets, but it has only a very limited influence on gang graffiti.

Heller: You had to go through many gang neighborhoods to document Cholo. Did you have any scuffles?

Chastanet: Not really, but I was close to it several times—I had to run a couple of times. Approximately half of the photographs are shot from the car while driving slowly. Howard Gribble was using the same method back in the 1970s. I was usually shooting photos in the early morning, from 7:00 to 11:00 a.m. (mobsters don’t wake up very early), and after 12:00 p.m. it was only possible to do some recognizing of neighborhoods by car and walking, no cameras with me. It was problematic because most of the gang graffiti is removed within 12 hours by the different municipalities of Los Angeles county. Basically, I wanted to work with an SLR camera first, but the street context didn’t permit it many times. I had to be as discreet as possible so I used a digital point-and-shoot camera—sometimes taking the picture under my arm and shoulder to hide the camera while walking. In all neighborhoods most of the people believed I was a cop. Rarely it was possible to engage in conversation, but I was not expecting it. I had to jump over fences for some pictures, and also had some problems with LAPD while shooting photos from the banks of different freeways.

Cholo writing on a Los Angeles street, c. 2000s. (photo: François Chastanet)

Heller: You’ve documented graffiti in São Paolo, Brazil, and now L.A. What is it that appeals to your eye and sense of aesthetics? Do you have your sights set on another genre of graffiti to document next?

Chastanet: In my work the main idea is to document original graffiti phenomena that created their own visual culture, different from the New York kind of graffiti that became almost a worldwide conformity today, partly because during a long period New York graffiti was the only graffiti visible in traditional media. Tags and pieces from New York were also over-documented in the graffiti fanzines and books world. A book like Subway Art by Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper (first published in 1984) had a massive impact worldwide and made the global emergence of graffiti possible worldwide, spreading mimicry among the youth. Even young Japanese writers don’t write with their own characters and choose to follow the existing practices based on the Latin alphabet (only a few are using Japanese signs). The New York myth of the origins is still so strong today that very few people worldwide try to surpass it or to find another way, their own way linked with a specific urban context. And the internet reinforces the recurrent tendency toward sterile mimicry, a lot of “me too” people.

Only few original alternative models exist independently to the now global New York experience/aesthetic—the São Paulo pixação scene and Cholo writing in Los Angeles are two pretty rare examples and constitute geographical aesthetical particularities. We can observe the emergence of a genuine “urban efficiency” in (illegal) architectural lettering, the illegal and hand-crafted context bringing new formal solutions. The fact that these letterings are illegal is essential; pixações from São Paulo can be seen as an alphabet designed for urban invasion, a beautiful “total coverage” writing system. So both the pixações and Cholo letters can be seen as an expression of the consequences of the 21st-century megalopolis conditions on the drawing of letterforms, as an unexpected evolution of the Latin alphabet. São Paulo and Los Angeles Cholo writers were able to create their own original identity through letterforms, this fact being pretty unique in the visual communication of subcultures. As an architect interested in urban planning, and a graphic designer and typographer by academic training, it was hard not to be interested be this.

Detail of contemporary Cholo writing, c. 2000s. (photo: François Chastanet)

Heller: Do you link this to typographic or calligraphic history?

Chastanet: Like many people I always have been fascinated by the history and evolution of letterforms, calligraphy, etc. But I had the feeling that calligraphy was a field mainly marked by historic mimicry rarely questioning what is writing today, what is writing without a broad pen (the contrast of “translation,” according to Gerrit Noordzij’s analysis of the letterform) or without a pointed flexible pen (the contrast of “expansion”), but with tools of the 20th century such as ballpoints (Bic Biros) and felt-tip pens (Pentel’s SignPen) producing writing without contrast (without classic thick and thin effect). In a way, calligraphers produce calligraphy, not today’s writing or useful models for the masses. Nobody is using a broad pen anymore in its everyday practice, even graffiti writers that were obligated to use broad pen markers because the only really big markers existing on the market—for many years were broad pens—recently created their own tools, giant markers with round tips (mop markers and squeezers). We have to accept that we are now a monolinear writing civilization based on ballpoints and felt-tip pens way of thinking since more than 50 years now, and the consequences of this is too rarely observed in today’s type design production (mainly never-ending re-conducting the historical existing type of contrast with only slight variations in proportions, weights and outlines). Nevertheless, quality typefaces like Flora by Gerard Unger—who worked on his own handwriting with a ballpoint for this font—or ABC-Schrift by Hans Eduard Meier constitute interesting projects.

Album cover for Rank Strangers (Taxim Records) using Cholo lettering by Rick Griffin.

Both São Paulo and Los Angeles offer us a chance to see other and different ideas, changing the structure of the letter itself, even if the people practicing it are not totally conscious of what they are doing. These two examples are not just vernacular phenomena, there is an authority, a real knowledge in the mastering of drawing written signs, imparted year after year through generations (like calligraphy and its transmission through history), a shared knowledge with a relatively long history in the case of Los Angeles. I am not interested in vernacular for vernacular, I am interested in trying to describe the genesis of innovative shapes, mainly letterforms, urban contexts offering many examples from my point of view. It’s a matter of drawing quality, whatever the categorization of a given practice (whether institutionally recognized or not), playing with letter strokes and intelligence of composition with architectural space. Large-scale writing (off the page) is maybe one of the last spaces where handlettering/gestures resist the keyboard ever-growing monopoly.

Heller: What other graffiti or cult letter cultures intrigue you?

Chastanet: China and Japan (kanji civilizations) are definitely interesting me. I have seen some interesting examples of inscriptions mixing Japanese and short English acronyms made by the Bosozoku, Japanese motorcycle gangs (pretty strong in the 1970s and 1980s) and also some graffiti poetry and messages traced to Kyoto’s different temples by the same anonymous author, inscriptions made in the 19th century apparently. I also have personal type design projects around questions of monolinear writing, changing the usual referent in a font project, i.e., working from today’s different handstyles of the Latin alphabet.

by Steven Heller
Source : http://www.aiga.org/

Steven Heller, co-chair of the Designer as Author MFA and co-founder of the MFA in Design Criticism at School of Visual Arts, is the author of Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century (Phaidon Press), Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State (Phaidon Press) and most recently Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failure, and Lessons Learned (Allworth Press). He is also the co-author of New Vintage Type(Thames & Hudson), Becoming a Digital Designer (John Wiley & Co.), Teaching Motion Design(Allworth Press) and more. www.hellerbooks.com

Tyrone “Baby Champ” Stevenson, who styles himself the Scraper Bike King, says the first scraper bikes were created by Oakland teens who coveted, but could not afford, scraper cars — souped-up sedans painted with bright colors and with rims so large they scrape the undercarriage. Scraper bikes are such a hit that many teens skip the cars and keep pedaling well past the age of 16.

Baby Champ organize the annual “Bike 4 Life” ride to call for an end to violence in Oakland’s neighborhoods. “We’re trying to bring together a gun truce,” he says, “because a lot of people in our community are dying from guns.”

” The Scraper Bike Movement seeks to capture the creativity of youth living within dangerous communities.
It gives them a positive outlet that is fun, educational, and promotes healthy lifestyles.
The Scraper Bike Movement offers youth a sustainable group of peers that is positive and motivating.
We want to expand and enlighten young peoples perspective on life through fixing and painting bicycles.
Our goal is to support youth entrepreneurship and cultural innovation.”

In order to become a member of the Original Scraper Bike Team, you must: Be a resident of Oakland, CA.
Be at least 7y/o or older. Maintain A 3.0 Grade Point Average (GPA), Create your own Scraper Bike…
(It Has To Be Amazing, Or Else You Can’t Ride.) A single-file line when riding.
After 10 rides The Scraper Bike King and his Captains will decide if your bike is up to standards and if you can follow simple guidelines. After your evaluation we will consider you a member and honor you with an Original Scraper Bike Team Shirt.
Only worn when Mobbin’ Stay posted to our website for all upcoming Scraper Bike Rides…”
– The Scraper Bike King

A film by Drea Cooper & Zackary Canepari

http://www.originalscraperbikes.blogspot.com/

ThreeFrames.net

« Pro » is one of the best writer of our generation.
Parisian born in 1976, influenced by American comics, science fiction and horror movies, painting pieces in a retro-futuristic style with Egyptian symbols and secret societies signs + post-apocalyptic scenery…

« Pro » foremost for me a pioneer in France in terms of fluidity of the line.
This week I talked with him about our first met in 2001 and I thought it would be an opportunity to make a post with some recent photographs.
Even if I present some paintings and sketches of his own (which are crazy too) I want you to remember this typical flow of a throw-up master !

http://princepro176.blogspot.com/

http://en.free-voina.org/

© Mark Surface International. All rights reserved.

In 2009 with the help of the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, Stephen Powers brought graffiti back to it’s original roots, in a form of a love letter.

Let’s go surfing ! ^_^

{postscript: I'll let the old articles up for a while, but one day...
they would disappear forever-ever-ever from this blog.}
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Chers lecteurs et amis,
Il est temps de rafraîchir ce blog avec une flopée de trucs de la rue !
Je ne sais pas pourquoi je vous ai parlé de géopolitique et de nourriture ici, mais je n’ai pas le niveau pour parler de ces choses là dans une langue qui n’est pas mienne…(en vérité, je galère en Anglais).
Malheureusement ou heureusement, j’ai d’autres compétences qui ne demandent pas beaucoup de mots pour les illustrer.
En tant qu’ “Archiviste de Rue”, je vais vous montrer un peu ce qui se passe sur la place publique en terme de photographie, d’art, de sport, d’architecture et  de vandalisme.
Voici le coeur d’un véritable “Pêcheur de Rue”.

Je vous salis ma rue ^_^

{postscriptum : je vais laisser les anciens articles en place pendant
un certain temps, mais un jour, ils devraient disparaître à jamais de la surface de ce blog.}

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Estimados lectores y amigos,
Es hora de volver a cargar este blog con un montón de cosas de lacalle !
Yo no sé por qué te dije sobre la geopolítica y la comida aquí, pero notengo el nivel para hablar de estas cosas en un idioma que no es mío…
Por desgracia o por suerte, tengo otras habilidades que no requierenmuchas palabras para ilustrarlos.
Como “Archivista de la Calle”, te voy a mostrar un poco sobre lo que sucede en la arena pública en términos de la fotografía, el arte, la arquitectura y el vandalismo.
Aquí está el corazón de un “Pescador de la Calle”.

Vamos a la playa, señor zorro ! ^_^

{posdata: voy a dejar que los viejos artículos por un tiempo, 
pero un día que desaparecería para siempre de este blog.}

The “Street Art View” site was developed at LODUCCA, Sao Paulo, Brazil, by creative director Guga Ketzer, creative Raphael Franzini, and art director Gustavo de Lacerda.

source : ARTE tv via Gasface

Sure, the concept looks like a model car you might buy at Toys R’ Us, but the technology is sound, and the engineers think it could be ready to fly relatively soon, according to Steven Reid, vice president of unmanned aircraft systems at AAI, the Textron subsidiary that produced the Shadow UAV.
“Envision a Humvee-like vehicle with wings that fold out from the side and attach just above the rear door…” Reid says.

Textron’s plan is to integrate its work on military ground vehicles and unmanned aircraft like the Shadow, and combine it with licensed technology from its partnership with Carter Aviation Technologies, a small Texas-based outfit working on a personal air vehicle for the commercial market. Textron is incorporating Carter’s slowed compound rotor technology, which uses rotors that are similar to helicopter blades but heavily weighted in the tips. As the aircraft takes off, the rotor provides lift, but as the vehicle gains speed, the rotor slows down and the wings provide lift.
The vehicle would have a roof panel that contains wings that rotate and fold out from the sides, as well as a mast that comes up and houses the slowed rotor system. Coming out the back of the vehicle is a shrouded, ducted fan that provides forward motion, and then a series of control surfaces that help regulate speed, as well as pitch, roll and yaw.

To win funding for the project that DARPA formally calls Transformer, the company has to meet a challenging set of demands. The defense agency has asked companies and researchers to come up with a flyable vehicle that can carry up to four people, is capable of vertical takeoff and landing and can travel without having to refuel at ranges for 250 nautical miles (with a combination of driving and flying). While DARPA officials have talked about such a vehicle for avoiding roadside bombs, they are also considering it for a variety of missions, including “strike and raid, intervention, interdiction, insurgency and counterinsurgency, reconnaissance, medical evacuation and logistical supply.”

For veteran defense companies like Textron, the DARPA project did elicit some surprise. “I have to admit…” recalls Reid, “we scratched our heads and asked: Is this real?” But if the goal of DARPA’s Transformer project to hunt down innovative technologies that may lie resident at nontraditional defense companies, then Textron’s approach, which draws heavily on Carter Aviation, may pave the way.
Despite the far-out notion of a flying Humvee, Reid says the company’s engineers are intrigued by the idea of pushing the envelope on aircraft technology, and the concept fits well with ideas they already have about combining manned and unmanned aircraft, particularly helicopters. While Reid jokes about flying cars not being in Textron’s “five-year plan” he says the DARPA program is exciting because it allows the company to build off Carter Aviation’s technology, and perhaps incorporate that into the Shadow UAV.
“Quite frankly, our hopes are quite modest…” Reid says. “We don’t have visions of fleet sales of flying Humvees quite yet.”

By SHARON WEINBERGER (Pop Mech)

http://www.darpa.mil/

Infographic by WordStream Internet Marketing Software

Every night, the streets of Buenos Aires fill with those who, before Argentina’s economic collapse, did not exist.
These ‘new’ visitors are the cartoneros, the men, women and children who sift through the city’s garbage and at dawn take the paper and cardboard to sell in exchange for cash. In 2002, one of the biggest currency devaluations in history attracted foreign tourists and tens of thousands of cartoneros to the city. Tourists compare Buenos Aires with Paris – though for the cartoneros, recruited by unemployment and an astronomical rise in the price of paper, the place is more an inferno of poverty. But it could be that the collapse has engendered, as well as poor people, creative alternatives inside the inferno.

‘It will become the most important publisher in the country, I’m sure of it.’ This doesn’t seem improbable when Washington Cucurto, writer and one of three founders of Eloísa Cartonera, says it. This is the first publisher to produce books with covers of cardboard, collected and hand-painted by cartoneros. Eloísa is autogestionado, a ‘self-start’ undertaking that has already published more than 20 titles, some by unpublished authors, others by well-established ones.

Ricardo Piglia, one of the most important living Argentinean writers, has donated a story for Eloísa to publish, as has César Aira, whose Mil Gotas, an unedited nouvelle, has already sold 800 copies – considerably exceeding the average sales of local authors by major publishers in Argentina.

The publishing experiment – made up of four cartoneros turned- artisans and three artists – has had extraordinary results. Their books break the boundary that separates intellectual production from the street and poverty, for Eloísa Cartonera links up those who rarely meet: the cartonero and the writer.

‘That is an historic alliance,’ explains Piglia. ‘New networks are being created in Argentina, and writers are finding ways to connect themselves to the new social situation. It’s not about making a cult of poverty, but rather, not allowing oneself to be intimidated by it.’

Writers report with words, but Eloísa converts those words into a working tool to give to someone who’s unemployed.

Without access to credit – scarce since the economic collapse – nor help from the state; without a formal distribution system or publicity, but with hand-painted covers which make every book unique, with the artisanal work of fourcartoneros who until a few months before were scouring the city at night in search of cardboard, few people now doubt that Eloísa Cartonera is the cultural event of the year in Argentina.

Piglia echoes this when he says: ‘Literature is a strange industry that shifts a lot of money… but impoverishes the writers. A very modern factory that sustains itself on the archaic work of those who write in a room. Eloísa is closer to that [archaic] location.’ And, distanced from the big business of publishing, it is enlarging the circle of readers with the cheapest books on the market, selling in the most popular bookshops for a dollar apiece.

Washington Cucurto – known for his portrayals of the Buenos Aires underworld – divides his time between the municipal library where he works, and the workshop where the books are produced. Here, on one of the shelves, is Eloísa’s latest gem: the posthumous work of the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos, a bilingual edition of a previously unpublished work in two volumes. Cucurto says with pride: ‘It’s our best book; not yet published in Brazil.’

Fixing the photocopied pages of a book to the cardboard cover, Cucurto explains how they pay five times what the recycling companies pay for the materials that the cartoneros bring.

All the books are made with photocopied pages. ‘We have a dream of buying a press to bring down costs, but we don’t yet have enough money,’ he says.

Here there are no plans to take over the means of production, nor to abolish waged work; what’s at stake is subsistence, the daily plate of food. For unemployment, in a state that prioritizes the payment of debt to Japanese or Italian bondholders, means hunger.

‘The project comes out of necessity,’ explains Cucurto, whose small publishing house crumbled when the devaluation of 2002 increased the price of imported paper by 300 per cent in a few months. ‘Would that many Eloísas might appear so that people might live a little better,’ he adds.

Every evening at six a train arrives in Buenos Aires from the suburbs. That’s how the cartoneros travel: on the Tren Blanco (‘White Train’) which the rail company – privatized, like everything else, in the neoliberal feast of the 1990s – puts on for the use of the ‘new’ visitors. Some mothers leave their children in special kindergartens for cartonero kids; other children follow their parents and collect cardboard. The return train leaves every day after midnight. As I am about to go, I ask Cucurto about the future of Eloísa. ‘I can’t think about the future,’ he replies. ‘I only think about the work of today, from one day to the next.’

Eloísa Cartonera talked with Tomás Bril

To contact Eloísa Cartonera, email jsbarilaro@hotmail.com
http://www.eloisacartonera.com.ar

The work — based on data collected by NASA’s ICESat, Terra, and Aqua satellites — should help scientists build an inventory of how much carbon the world’s forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through ecosystems and back into the atmosphere. Michael Lefsky of the Colorado State University described his results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

› View larger image
A first-of-its-kind global map shows forest canopy height in shades of green from 0 to 70 meters (230 feet). For any patch of forest, the height shown means that 90 percent or more of the trees in the patch are that tall or taller. Areas without forest are shown in tan. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon/Based on data from Michael Lefsky.

Where’s the Carbon?
Scientific interest in the new map goes far beyond curiosities about tree height. The map has implications for an ongoing effort to estimate the amount of carbon tied up in Earth’s forests and for explaining what sops up 2 billion tons of “missing” carbon each year.
Humans release about 7 billion tons of carbon annually, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide. Of that, 3 billion tons end up in the atmosphere and 2 billion tons in the ocean. It’s unclear where the last two billion tons of carbon go, though scientists suspect forests capture and store much of it as biomass through photosynthesis.

There are hints that young forests absorb more carbon than older ones, as do wetter ones, and that large amounts of carbon end up in certain types of soil. But ecologists have only begun to pin down the details as they try to figure out whether the planet can continue to soak up so much of our annual carbon emissions and whether it will continue to do so as climate changes.

“What we really want is a map of above-ground biomass, and the height map helps get us there,” said Richard Houghton, an expert in terrestrial ecosystem science and the deputy director of the Woods Hole Research Center.

One of Lefsky’s colleagues, Sassan Saatchi of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has already started combining the height data with forest inventories to create biomass maps for tropical forests. Complete global inventories of biomass, when they exist, can improve climate models and guide policymakers on how to minimize the human impact on climate with carbon offsets.

More immediately, said University of Maryland remote sensing expert Ralph Dubayah, tree canopy heights can be plugged into models that predict the spread and behavior of fires, as well as ecological models that help biologists understand the suitability of species to specific forests.

› View larger image
A forest canopy height map of the contiguous United States. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon/Based on data from Michael Lefsky.

Seeing Lasers through the Trees
Lefsky used data from a laser technology called LIDAR that’s capable of capturing vertical slices of surface features. It measures forest canopy height by shooting pulses of light at the surface and observing how much longer it takes for light to bounce back from the ground surface than from the top of the canopy. Since LIDAR can penetrate the top layer of forest canopy, it provides a fully-textured snapshot of the vertical structure of a forest — something that no other scientific instrument can offer.

“LIDAR is unparalleled for this type of measurement,” Lefsky said, noting it would have taken weeks or more to collect the same amount of data in the field by counting and measuring tree trunks that LIDAR can capture in seconds.

He based his map on data from more than 250 million laser pulses collected during a seven year period. That may sound like an enormous amount of data, but each pulse returns information about just a tiny portion of the surface. Overall, the LIDAR offered direct measurements of 2.4 percent of the Earth’s forested surfaces.

To create his global map forest height map, Lefsky combined the LIDAR data with information from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), a satellite instrument aboard both the Terra and Aqua satellites that senses a much broader swath of Earth’s surface, even though it doesn’t provide the vertical profile.

“This is a really just a first draft, and it will certainly be refined in the future,” said Lefsky.

Fusing the two sets of data proved difficult, and Lefsky spent years honing quantitative techniques to make the combination possible. Part of the difficulty was that the LIDAR data Lefsky used came from an instrument aboard ICESat, a mission optimized to study the topography of ice sheets, not vegetation.

The next generation LIDAR measurements of forests and biomass, which will improve the resolution of the map considerably, could come from NASA’s Deformation, Ecosystem Structure and Dynamics of Ice (DESDynI) satellite, proposed for the latter part of this decade.

“We’ve never been able to look at a map and say here’s how tall the canopy is before,” said Dubayah, one of the DESDynI project scientists. “This map is a big step forward, and it really helps set the stage for DESDynI and shows what’s possible.”

Adam Voiland
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

http://www.nasa.gov

From paper to electronic ink and back again, Moleskine comes full circle with protective covers for the Amazon Kindle, the world’s most popular e-book reader: a new analog-digital hybrid  designed for the e-bookworms.

The features and style of the cover are those of a classic Moleskine notebook: sleek rounded corners, strong elastic band, and the legendary smooth black cover. Inside, a suede lining protects the electronic device, while four corner elastic bands hold it in place.

Each cover includes a package of two reporter-style notebooks with black flexible cover, rounded corners, and blank ivory paper for jotting notes and insights.

The very idea of this new cover came from the Moleskine “notebook hackers”, who create their own custom-made accessories weaving together paper pages and digital tools. Throughout the web, hundreds of communities and discussions can be found where such Moleskine “hackers” publish their inventions. Dedicated blogs, Flickr pages, and even YouTube videos highlight the power and vitality of the Moleskine digital-analog connection.

Available on Amazon.

http://www.peterroot.com/

21 photographies des Yamakasi seront exposées le vendredi 25 juin pendant la conférence de presse du meeting international de l’art du déplacement.
Exposition Ha Sayf_Présentation du Maire et rencontre avec les Yamakasi + déambulation et spectacle/demo dans la ville.
Rens : http://www.add-academy.com/addexperience

http://www.wordle.net

Her current series of work focuses primarily on the architectural elements as well as the culture of street scenes from small American towns. It is, as always with Murray, the complexity of details within the scene where she focuses her primary attention. ”My desire is to document the moment, because 25 years from now, it will not look nor will it feel this way again.”

Her paintings have been collected by people from around the world and have won numerous awards from various art festivals she has participated in over the years.

http://www.karlamurray.com

The  577-meter high Makkah Clock Royal Tower, scheduled to open in the third quarter of 2010, will become the world’s tallest hotel, Fairmont Hotels and Resorts Group said early this week.
The opening of the hotel will replace Rotana’s newly opened 333-meter tall Rose Rayhaan in Dubai for the world’s title.
The tower, which is being developed by the Saudi Bin Laden Group, will also house the Emaar Residences.
The Fairmont hotel will be the center point of the iconic Abraj Al Bait Complex, part of the King Abdul Aziz Endowment Project which has been tasked with upgrading the areas around the Two Holy Mosques.
Located in the holy city of Makkah, the hotel will be adjacent to the Masjid Al-Haram, the holiest site in Islam.
The hotel will have 858 rooms and will include a 40-meter clock, more than five times larger than Big Ben in London, which will be visible up to 17 kilometers away and will announce the daily prayers to the Muslim world.
The tower will also include the Lunar Observation Center and Islamic Museum.
_ Certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s tallest hotel _

http://www.stevethomasart.com

Written, directed by : Patrick Jean
Director of Photograhy : Matias Boucard
SFX by Patrick Jean and guests

Credits & copyright Patrick Jean /
http://www.onemoreproduction.com

http://www.tallerditoria.com

Synopsis :

Director Tamra Davis pays homage to her friend in this definitive documentary but also delves into Basquiat as an iconoclast. His dense, bebop-influenced neoexpressionist work emerged while minimalist, conceptual art was the fad; as a successful black artist, he was constantly confronted by racism and misconceptions. Much can be gleaned from insider interviews and archival footage, but it is Basquiat’s own words and work that powerfully convey the mystique and allure of both the artist and the man.

Featuring interviews with : Julian Schnabel, Larry Gagosian, Bruno Bischofberger, Tony Shafrazi, Fab 5 Freddy, Jeffrey Deitch, Glenn O’Brien, Maripol, Kai Eric, Nicholas Taylor, Fred Hoffmann, Michael Holman, Diego Cortez, Annina Nosei, Suzanne Mallouk, Rene Ricard, among many others.

ARTFORUM Magazine : Volume XX No. 4, December 1981. p.35-43

The Radiant Child by Rene Ricard

I remember the first Tags (where is Taki ?), Breaking (where you spin on your head), Rapping (where I first heard it). I know the names, but are the names important ? Where is Taki ? Perhaps because I have seen graffiti, then seen something else, thrown myself on the dance floor, then gone on to dance another way, I say that the reason for abandoning so much during the ’70s was that each fad became an institution. What we can finally see from the ’70s buried among the revivals and now surfacing (Tagging, Breaking, Rapping) was at least one academy without program. Distinct to the ’70s, graffiti, in particular, was the institutionalization of the idiosyncratic that has led to the need for individuation within this anonymous vernacular. This is why the individuals (Crazy Legs) must distinguish themselves.
Artists have a responsibility to their work to raise it above the vernacular. Perhaps it is the critic’s job to sort out from the melee of popular style the individuals who define the style, who perhaps inaugurated it (where is Taki) and to bring them to public attention. The communal exhibitions of the last year and a half or so, from the Times Square Show, the Mudd Club shows, the Monumental Show, to the New York/New Wave Show at P.S. 1, have made us accustomed to looking at art in a group, so much so that an exhibit of an individual’s work seems almost antisocial. Colab, Fashion Moda, etc., have created a definite populist ambience, and like all such organizations, from the dawn of modern, have dug a base to launch new work. These are vast communal enterprises as amazing that they got off the ground as the space shuttle and even more, fly-by-night, that they landed on solid ground.

The most accessible and immediately contagious productions in these shows were those of the graffiti stylists. The graffiti style, so much a part of this town, New York, is in our blood now. It’s amazing that something so old can be made so new. There is an instant appeal in the way spray paint looks, ditto markers. Any Tag by any teenager on any train on any line is fairly heartbreaking. In these autographs is the inherent pathos of the archaeological site, the cry down the vast endless track of time that “I am somebody,” on a wall in Pompeii, on a rock at Piraeus, in the subway graveyard at some future archaeological dig, we ask, “Who was Taki ?”

Graffiti refutes the idea of anonymous art where we know everything about a work except who made it: who made it is the whole Tag. Blade, Lady Pink, Pray, Sex, Taki, Cliff 159, Futura 2000, Dondi, Zephyr, Izzy, Haze, Daze, Fred, Kool, Stan 153, SAMO, Crash. (Crash is still bombing.) But trains get buffed (the damnatio memoriae of the Transit Authority), and with the need for identity comes the artist’s need for identification with the work, and to support oneself by the work is the absolute distinction between the amateur and the pro. Therefore, the obvious was to raise oneself by the supreme effort of will from the block, from the subway, to the Mudd, to the relative safety and hygiene of the gallery. Because an artist is somebody. Say what you will about group shows and collaborative enterprise: Das Kapital was written by one man. This is no graffito, this is no train, this is a Jean-Michel Basquiat. This is a Keith Haring.

Both these artists are a success in the street where the most critical evaluation of a graffito takes place. Jean-Michel is proud of his large SAMO Tag in a schoolyard, surrounded by other Tags on top of Tags, yet not marked over. This demonstrates respect for the artist as not just a graffitist but as an individual, the worth of whose Tag is recognized. There’s prestige in not being bombed over. There are also fake SAMOS and Harings as well as a counter-Haring graffitist who goes around erasing him. The ubiquity of Jean-Michel’s SAMO and Haring’s baby Tags has the same effect as advertising; so famous now is that baby button that Haring was mugged by four 13-year-olds for the buttons he was carrying (as well as for his Sony Walkman.) The Radiant Child on the button is Haring’s Tag. It is a slick Madison Avenue colophon. It looks as if it’s always been there. The greatest thing is to come up with something so good it seems as if it’s always been there, like a proverb. Opposite the factory-fresh Keith Haring is Jean-Michel’s abandoned cityscape. His prototype, the spontaneous collage of peeling posters, has been there for everyone’s ripping off. His earlier paintings were the logical extension of what you could do with a city wall. (For the moment he’s stopped the collage.) His is a literal case of bringing something in off the street but with the element of chance removed. I’m always amazed at how people come up with things. Like Jean-Michel. How did he come up with the words he puts all over everything, his way of making a point without overstating the case, using one or two words he reveals a political acuity, gets the viewer going in the direction he wants, the illusion of the bombed-over wall. One or two words containing a full body. One or two words on a Jean-Michel contain the entire history of graffiti. What he incorporates into his pictures, whether found or made, is specific and selective. He has a perfect idea of what he’s getting across, using everything that collates to his vision.

Where is Taki. When writing or just thinking about say a movement or a style, we automatically attach progenitors of common appearance, attributes of an individual or stylistic precursor to the object of contemplation. I bought an assortment of Wild Style and Plain Style (Daze Rocks, etc.) Tags done in marker on a piece of newsprint at the Mudd Club graffiti show because it looked like a late 18th century Chinese literati-type thing, no, maybe more Japanese, yes Japanese. Even the names of the different scripts are like Japanese calligraphic distinctions. (The underlying discipline is getting a character down so good you can repeat it exactly.) This of course leads one into the Zen calligraphic renovations of, say, Mark Tobey, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and just about everybody in the late ’40s, early ’50s. And you have no choice but to look at things this way because . . . “Does His Voice Sound Some Echo in your Heart.”  This is the double-headed monster of erudition, half seeing too much and half of it blind.

I asked Jean-Michel where he got the crown. “Everybody does crowns.” Yet the crown sits securely on the head of Jean-Michel’s repertory so that it is of no importance where he got it bought it stole it; it’s his. He won that crown. In one painting there is even a © copyright sign with a date in impossible Roman numerals directly under the crown. We can now say he copyrighted the crown. He is also addicted to the copyright sign itself. Double copyright. So the invention isn’t important; it’s the patent, the transition from the public sector into the private, the monopolizing personal usurpation of a public utility, of prior art; no matter who owned it before, you own it now. After all, Judy Rifka did not invent the artist’s dilemma. I think it’s hers for the time being, however.

But influence, when we reach the peak and look down at what we’ve come from, see mists and clouds under mist, not the base of the mountain. As much as one would like to escape the idea of generation and decade in favor of something better, this provides an easy common way to track development. Where is Taki ? Graffiti has been around in the way we recognize it now for about ten years and whether one considers this a long or a short amount of time (the entire High Renaissance from the painting of the Mona Lisa to the Sistine ceiling covered exactly ten years) it is already in its second generation. The transition, however, was neither sudden nor unexpected because in the past ten years we see the full exchange of graffiti from trainstyle to museum candidate. What’s unusual is that the gallery bid was not made by the innovators but by the second generation. Graffiti has had a dyslexic development in that the second generation is capitalizing on territory pioneered by its lost innovators. More interesting and more possible to scan than the movement leading up to the picture is, rather, the picture’s life after it leaves the artist. The picture must be protected. (I’m not interested in the prestige of discovery. Part of the artist’s job is to get the work where I will see it. I have to be aware of it before I can hype it. I consider myself the metaphor of the public. I’m a public eye. And I only hype the sureshot. The possibility of life without galleries ? But how much time, when you really get going, can you spend crating, carrying on correspondences, hiring secretaries, negotiating your appearances in European museums, in fine all the little labors that galleries are supposed to do and that keep you away from your work ? There is a place for responsible representation. This is an enormously important season in New York and to make a false step could have severe repercussions for years. In a city comprised of individuals it is important at some point to form the right connections; for your own protection you have to trust someone. Someone else has to have a personal commitment to your work so that it isn’t shopped like merchandise. It’s cute to be 20 and be pursued when hundreds of young artists are dropping their slides off at these same galleries, but the crass fast-turnover speculators’ market can have a deleterious effect on an artist’s future career if you don’t have protection. We are no longer collecting art we are buying individuals. This is no piece by SAMO. This is a piece of SAMO. When the work tops a certain mark and the collectors begin their wholesale unloading of your old work in direct competition with your new work you’re in trouble with no protection. Every time one of your old paintings is bought one of your new paintings isn’t. Plus, old more famous pictures always cost more and you don’t get a cut off the resale. Of course a record price always helps an artist, but what if the artist has radically changed styles ? In any event, it’s clear that a good dealer is very careful about where the things land. If there’s no personal commitment the chances are that the dealer-as-buyer will unload the stuff anywhere for the money, why not, without thought to possible repercussions it could have in the long run. Whereas if the dealer has a stake in your development they will, for example, save the best picture for a possible museum sale rather than just anywhere the cash is flowing. Besides, when anything goes wrong you can blame it on your gallery.)

“What’s with art anyway, that / We give it such precedence ?” 
Most basic is the common respect, the popular respect for living off one’s vision. My experience has shown me that the artist is a person much respected by the poor because they have circumvented the need to exert the body, even of time, to live off what appears to be the simplest bodily act. This is an honest way to rise out of the slum, using one’s sheer self as the medium, the money earned rather a proof pure and simple of the value of that individual, The Artist. This is a basic class distinction in the perception of art where a picture your son did in jail hangs on your wall as a proof that beauty is possible even in the most wretched; that someone who can make a beautiful thing can’t be all bad; and that beauty has an ability to lift people as a Vermeer copy done in a tenement is surely the same as the greatest mural by some MFA. An object of art is an honest way of making a living, and this is much a different idea from the fancier notion that art is a scam and a ripoff. The bourgeoisie have, after all, made it a scam. But you could never explain to someone who uses God’s gift to enslave that you have used God’s gift to be free.

What is it that makes something look like art ? I can’t answer that. I asked someone once why he liked Jean-Michel’s work and why it was being singled out for acclaim and he said, “because it looks like art.” But then again art doesn’t always look like art at first. The way the space shuttle that lifts off doesn’t much resemble the space shuttle as it lands.

My favorite Francesco Clemente, for instance, looks just like something in a junk store. It’s even painted on one of those premade stretched canvases that are the stock in trade of amateurs. The direct and artless oil paint here, however it looks like a 13-year-old painted it, is very much about being 13. I remember still green ponds like that where I’d go . . . and the anomalous sexuality of the frog, that, no matter what sex it is, a frog’s crotch, belly, and thighs, when viewed together, look like a woman. It was brought to my attention that the very thing that freezes this picture compositionally, the flashbulblike shadow of the arm, is what keeps it from being the work of a child; children don’t depict cast shadows. Clemente has frozen an instant here, and the sex object of the painting, the frog’s crotch, is already underwater. This preservation of a lost moment from childhood, perfectly seen and remembered in a flash, sets this picture apart as art, yet it looks like something in a junk store.
Everybody wants to get on the Van Gogh Boat. There is no trip so horrible that someone won’t take it. Nobody wants to miss the Van Gogh Boat. The idea of the unrecognized genius slaving away in a garret is a deliciously foolish one. We must credit the life of Vincent van Gogh for really sending that myth into orbit. How many pictures did he sell. One. He couldn’t give them away. Almost no one could bear his work, even among the most modern of his colleagues. In the movie Lust For Life there is a scene of Kirk Douglas (as van Gogh) in front of La Grande Jatte being treated rudely by Georges Seurat. When I went to the Art Institute of Chicago to see the Grande Jatte, it was having a hard time competing with the white walls of the gallery. This habit of putting old pictures up against the white walls is deadly, the walls reflecting more light than the picture, but van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles was on the opposite wall and it was screaming at my back and I turned around and I listened. He has to be the most modern artist, still. Van Gogh’s don’t crack. But everybody hated them. We’re so ashamed of his life that the rest of art history will be retribution for van Gogh’s neglect. No one wants to be part of a generation that ignores another van Gogh. And yet looking at art history we see that these other guys were pros. They started when they were kids. They sold their work. They worked on commission. There is no great artist in all art history who was as ignored as van Gogh, yet people are still afraid of missing the Van Gogh Boat.
One of the obvious and more interesting developments that insure a nongallery look is the ready-made support, standardized stretchers, artist’s panels: the vocabulary of the amateur. The throwaway is the handle absolute of junk, and in using the throwaway one is relieved of the responsibility of constructing one’s own outside proportions. Pieces of foam rubber, doors, subway cars, toilet walls make one’s considerations, size of image, stroke, etc., purely inner ones. It is impracticable to enter a gallery carting the F train. In the Mudd Club “Beyond Words” show, the most impressive work was either in documentation (photos of bombed trains) or actual junk sprayed over, not the specially-constructed-for-exhibition pieces that looked, frankly, headshop, and it seemed clear to me that whoever was going to get out of the subway was going to have to figure out a way of sophisticating their work into scale, to avoid the cloying naiveté and preciousness that inspire more condescension and “isn’t that charming” than, say, awe in the viewer. I don’t mean that they have to go big. The sense of scale is innate and relying on found size isn’t good enough. When you cut up a roll of canvas you’ve made your biggest decision. Making something out of nothing is the prime artistic act and I don’t mean, “Come to my studio I’ve got ten refrigerator doors finished.”

So what defines the art look ? When people say Jean-Michel looks like art, the occult significance of the comment is that it looks like our expectation of art; there is observable history in his work. His touch has spontaneous erudition that comforts one as the expected does. In the first gallery piece I saw by Jean-Michel (as distinct from his Tag SAMO) the observable relationship of his drawing to past art alienated me as immediately as it gratified. The superbombers in the same show, with their egregious lack of art history, had the repellent appeal that commands self-analysis in the viewer (me). I didn’t want to miss the boat. When you first see a new picture you are very careful because you may be staring at van Gogh’s ear. Then I stopped caring about what the pictures should (and might later) look like; regardless of what Jean-Michels look like now, they are transmitting signals that I can receive, that are useful, and finally the graffiti bomb style looks like what it’s about and what it’s about is packaging.

Bomb style packages itself. At its purest, it’s a Tag, a perfect auto-logo, not the artists’ names but their trademarks. Designer jeans ? You are buying the label proper: the essential iconic self-representation. In any event, the bombers in the show clearly defined a vernacular and made me wonder how long this would take to get off the ground in a big way. Here was, as much as it was predicated on commercial art of the past, the commercial art of the future. Here was the look of the times, this is what packaging should look like: kids would buy it. These guys should get themselves design jobs, before they get ripped off. Several have already worked their way into the applied arts, where they belong: on record covers, doing the art direction for movies, slides behind Rappers, backdrops for Breakers. Sitting by yourself on a wall is different.

An artist’s attitude toward the work is telling. It’s all hype, sure, but there can be quality in hype and I’ve caught some sleazy acts. A guy came to my house to deliver a small picture. With a friend. No picture. Broke. “Give me the money I’ll come back later with the picture.” “OK.” While he was there he told me that he was entertaining the idea of giving Andy Warhol a picture. Well, Andy is everyone’s culture parent, it’s true, but I’m just a poor poet and Andy’s turnover must be thousands and thousands a week in prints alone, and it hurt my feelings that I had to pay 50 clams and Andy would get it for free. I could see, though, that this boy’s climb was on. This was my advice: don’t give him the picture. Kids do that. Trade. That’s what real artists do with each other. Since Andy’s a press junkie, and I see you’re getting the taste, call up page six of the Post and get a photographer to the Factory on the “Graffiti goes legit/street kid trades Tag for Soup Can” angle. You both get your picture in the paper, Andy comes off looking like friend of youth, you get a press clipping, and it’s gravy for all parties. Easily $50 worth of advice. So he left with the money, and, like copping drugs in the street, beat me for the picture. A month or so later, after some friends put on a little muscle, I finally got the doodad, and promptly gave it away. Foolish way to hype yourself. When you’re climbing a ladder, don’t kick out the rungs.

As much as undervaluation can kill, so can a false sense of the value of your work. Jean-Michel was advised to stop giving it away. But if your friends can’t have it, why live ? Overprotection is deadly; the stuff has to get out there to be seen. Making money is something between artists and their stomachs. To turn one’s work into fetish that is almost indistinct from oneself, to overpersonalize and covet one’s own work, is professional suicide. Fear of rip-off is paralysis. One is always ripped off. Keeping work a secret is the psychology of the applied artist, not the fine artist who must live in a dialogue.

Is innovation important ? When one compares Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures with Fellini’s Satyricon we see that Fellini manages with pasty millions a bad reproduction of what Jack Smith achieved with a sequin. The trick is to make it appear that the innovator ripped it off from you. A good example of this principle is the case of Judy Rifka’s work at the debut of the ’70s. Her single shapes on plywood are among the most important paintings of the decade. Every painter who saw them at the time recognized their influence. She could then be called a painter’s painter if feeding ideas to others is what painters’ painters do. I suspect that it would be a heartbreaking thing to watch others get credit for your invention. Her researches into Constructivist theory were groundbreaking, but a pioneer is never at a loss for uncharted territory. At the first group show at the Mudd Club I was arrested by a gray painting with a little red blob in it and some drawing on it of Patti Astor from her starring role as Vickie in the movie Underground USA. The application of the ground and the way that little red spot was laid on was obviously the work of an extremely sophisticated handler of paint. Although I’d never seen a Judy Rifka of this type the outline of the red left me in no doubt as to its author. There was no visible label and on inquiry I saw I was right. Hers is the poetry of New York. The joy in her new work, the reveling in these characters she creates superimposed on her earlier work, demonstrates that her concerns have dovetailed my own temporary ones: that a picture is only as interesting as its storyline. The Patti Astor iconography is supreme. One must become the iconic representation of oneself in this town. One is at the mercy of the recognition factor and one’s public appearance is absolute. (The iconic representation of the artist, in manifestations from sublime to tedious, sublime in Manzoni and Warhol through the tedium of Byars and Beuys, authorship as object, is the precedent for the legitimacy of the Tag. This is the individual as archetype, where we order a “Bud,” where every bleach blonde is called “Blondie,” the Tag name for the individual Deborah Harry. If Andy Warhol can’t be used as an object lesson in how to become iconic then his life has been a waste. We become our name. I have spent my life becoming my name so that it would somehow protect the radiant child it has been created to arm.) Judy’s perception of this is accurate. Her multiple-panel pictures are like movies. She has spent the last few years evolving a recognizable cast of characters to people her work. She is the eponymous lead. This is about her life in art, the frustrations and momentary ecstasies of painting a picture; the sub-mafia of artist’s assistants; the domestication of pet boys refined into their specific types that become at once the original and the archetype.

Where is Taki ? We can’t escape the etymology or genealogy of art. It’s not coincidental that the time that saw the gestation of graffiti was the period of gallery-referential art that flourished (wrong word) in the early ’70s. During the era of the white wall, what would have the greater effect on us now was being produced by guerrilla artists bombing trains during their mechanical slumber in Queens. Those teenage prophets are lost in the mists of their own maturity, reminiscent of the way the origin of the blues is lost, the simple expression of the individual followed much later by full-scale commercial exploitation. Contrary to the rules of modern art that hallow the innovator, here is the second generation capitalizing on the innovations of the first. The commercial exploitation of innovation is, conversely, the primary logic of commercial art.
Even as I write, the Transit Authority has unleashed police dogs around the Corona yard, so perhaps there is still hope. Bombing will continue even with the dogs. When it stops you’ll know it’s played out. If it’s still alive the autopsy will kill it. What would happen if subway graffiti were recognized as the native art it is? Would they find Taki and declare him a National Living Treasure as the Japanese do their keepers of the flame of native craft ? Or if the TA legitimizes it, i.e. encourages it with NEA funding ? What happens when the revolution is televised ? It bombs out. Train painting has already been severely formalized almost to decadence. It has become historically self-conscious, the progression from expression to Pop; there is a Campbell’s Soup can train; sophistication to boredom.
Looking through the Mailer book on graffiti from 1974, was it photographer’s optical bias, editorial selectivity, or was the classic period of graffiti as “abstract expressionist,” ’50s, as the book makes it look when compared to the Pop psychedelic ’60s of the train I was on today ? It looks so much more severe in the book, metallic style, less balloon style: tougher, muy switchblade, mas barrio. But who remembers what it looked like ? I remember that it was very sexy, the feeling; I don’t remember the look. Eidetic overlays can’t be trusted. What did it look like ?

Jean-Michels don’t look like the others. His don’t have that superbomb panache that is the first turn-on of the pop graffitist. Nor does his marker have that tai-chi touch. He doesn’t use spray but he’s got the dope, and right now what we need is information; I want to know what is going on in people’s minds and these pictures are useful. This article is about work that is information, not work that is about information. No matter what the envelope looks like to get it there, the dope’s inside. Let the Parisians copy the athletic togs le look américain jeune Puma sneakaires le graffiti mignon, style is spin-off; what the pictures are internally about is what matters. If you’re going to stand up there with the big kids you’ve got to be heavy, got to sit on a wall next to Anselm Kiefer next to Jonathan Borofsky next to Julian Schnabel and these guys are tough they can make you look real sissy. There’s only one place for a mindless cutie and it ain’t the wall, Jack.

Judy Rifka and Jean-Michel Basquiat have both evolved a vocabulary, and so in his way has Keith Haring. In his gray eminence entrepreneurial capacity as director of the Mudd Club shows he was of particular importance in the general dissemination of work by other young artists, and not secondarily his own. His work is faux graphic and looks ready-made, like international road signs. This immediacy is his trump card. It is the already-existing quality of his characters that deceives one into accepting them as already there without the intervention of an individual will. But he did make them up. In their impersonal code they are transmitting a personal narrative. The code is here to be cracked. These poor little characters wigging out from the radioactive communications they are bombarded with are superslick icons of turmoil and confusion. They are without will, without protection from impulses of mysterious source. We can laugh at their involuntary couplings and tiny horrified runnings around because we see them as we cannot see, as the fish cannot see the water, ourselves.

Of course what artists see us as can tell us more about themselves than about us. The second-generation Pop artists who’ve been popping up behind their more innovative contemporaries show more interest in the(ir) poor victims of cocktail dresses, in the trials and tribulations of dressing up and going out, enchained by our fashion slavery, in Society, than in society. Chief of the Clubbists is Robert Longo who in his own way is concerned with our contemporary solipsism. As an undercover agent of the Fashion Police I am reluctantly placing him under arrest partly for being two years behind the times but really for forgetting that fashion imitates art, and that art that imitates fashion is two removes from the source. Art Deco comes after Cubism. On the subject of Troy Brauntuch, and the use of pictures, his work seems to have been anticipated by an Edwardian novelist: “‘That habit of putting glass over an oil painting,’ she murmured, ‘makes always such a good reflection particularly when the picture’s dark. Many’s the time I’ve run into the National Gallery on my way to the Savoy and tidied myself before the Virgin of the Rocks . . .’”
We need to see ourselves now but not this literally. For some reason we need recognizable evidence of our existence. Something has happened and we need, if not advice, at least a demonstration of the situation and many of our fears are in the words contained in Jean-Michel’s pictures—Tar, Oil, Old Tin, Gold—we don’t need a lexicon to know what these mean. These morphemes are self-evident.

Phaedrus: Whom do you mean and what is his origin ?
Socrates: I mean an intelligent word graven on the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and who knows when to speak and when to be silent.
Phaedrus: You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is no more than an image?
Socrates: Yes, of course that is what I mean.

I’m always amazed by how people come up with things. Like Jean-Michel. How did he come up with those words he puts all over everything ? Their aggressively handmade look fits his peculiarly political sensibility. He seems to have become the gutter and his world view very much that of the downtrodden and dispossessed. Here the possession of almost anything of even marginal value becomes a token of corrupt materialism. This is the bum coveting a pair of Guston’s shoes. When Jean-Michel writes in almost subliterate scrawl “Safe plush he think” it is not on a Park Avenue facade that would be totally outside the beggar’s venue but on a rusted-out door in a godforsaken neighborhood. Plush to whom safe from what ? His is also the elegance of the clochard who lights up a megot with his pinkie raised. If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel. The elegance of Twombly is there but from the same source (graffiti) and so is the brut of the young Dubuffet. Except the politics of Dubuffet needed a lecture to show, needed a separate text, whereas in Jean-Michel they are integrated by the picture’s necessity. I’d rather have a Jean-Michel than a Cy Twombly. I do not live in the classical city. My neighborhood is unsafe. Also, I want my home to look like a pile of junk to burglars.

Politics can come up by inference in a work, without pointing, without overt dialectic, by the simplest depiction (as in the case of John Ahearn) of an individual. When one looks at Ahearn’s pieces , the sensibility is so specific and acute that we feel we would get the same feeling even if it looked entirely different. And his people are about feelings. I don’t know how anyone who could afford them would put them in their homes. “Why would the boss want to be reminded at home of the people who keep asking him for a raise ?” 
They are objects of devotion, of love and its ennobling ability, and are among the rarest and most moving in the history of art. They will command and dominate wherever they are hung and make all art that is anterior to it or that bears a resemblance seem like it was just leading up to Ahearn. They wipe out Segal. They make Duane Hanson seem like a snob and an insensitive jerk. When we look at Hanson’s lumpen proles and their dazed stupefaction we feel superior. Ahearns, like most physically dominant art, don’t reproduce well. The actual confrontation with the work is overwhelming. They are made to be seen from quite specific angles. Ahearn’s work is hung high, and these people up against the white wall of a gallery are looking down at the viewer with dignity, sobriety, querulousness, perfectly precise and specific expressions, fleeting and miraculously caught. The man seems to be looking into the future with intense responsibility as the woman, with her arms around his neck, trusts his ability to confront the world. I am that woman. Ahearn works in the South Bronx the way Caravaggio probably would. He gives his models the first cast. They’re poor and they’re owed the grace of their image. This is no exploitation and yet I have heard him referred to (by an artist) as a racist, exploiter of his sitters. If going into the ghetto and commemorating its inhabitants is racist, then what do you call people who segregate themselves and plot genocide ?

To Whites every Black holds a potential knife behind the back, and to every Black the White is concealing a whip. We were born into this dialogue and to deny it is fatuous. Our responsibility is to overcome the sins and fears of our ancestors and drop the whip, drop the knife. In Izhar Patkin’s parable of racial cannibalism we see that when a man with a .45 meets a man with a shotgun I guess the man with the pistol is a dead man.

Where is Taki ? I think now about Anya Phillips who so briefly illuminated this fleeting world. I think about clothes worn by people so recently and yet how long ago it all seems that Anya would show up in those cocktail dresses and of all things, a Chinese girl in a blonde wig. And now all the girls in their cocktail dresses who never heard of Anya and how quickly each generation catches the look of its creators and forgets the moral underneath. I think about how one must become the iconic representation of oneself if one is to outlast the vague definite indifference of the world. I think about how every bleach blonde is called Blondie in the street and Deborah Harry’s refutation of her iconic responsibility to reify her name as a brunette. We are that radiant child and have spent our lives defending that little baby, constructing an adult around it to protect it from the unlisted signals of forces we have no control over. We are that little baby, the radiant child, and our name, what we are to become, is outside us and we must become “Judy Rifka” or “Jean-Michel” the way I became “Rene Ricard.”
[End.]

http://jean-michelbasquiattheradiantchild.com
http://www.artforum.com

The new building, designed by architect Fumihiko Maki and his “Maki and Associates” firm, broke ground in 2007.
Influences on the building’s design included the artists Piet Mondrian and George Seurat, as well as the art of Japanese paper lanterns. The white, glass, and aluminum building includes touches of the primary colors red, blue, and yellow, which are often found in Mondrian’s paintings.

” The model is literally open collaboration between industry and academia. Research here at the Media Lab is highly creative but finds its way into the world via industry. The idea of designing serendipity, this building was designed to promote this type of thinking and capturing in an uncanny way this magic,” said Frank Moss.

The MIT Media Lab Complex design, which MIT had originally requested consist entirely of glass walls, had to be tempered to fit Cambridge energy requirements that restrict the use of glass construction in buildings. To accommodate the codes, Maki and his team integrated translucent aluminum screens over the building’s many glass and solid walls.
The screens over glass create a slightly pixelated view of the Charles River and Boston skyline when looking outside from within the building. It’s a nod to both the Media Lab’s digital world, as well as a pointillist adaption of landscape as seen in the paintings of Impressionist George Seurat.
Looking in at the Media Lab Complex at night, those same screens are lit from behind by the building’s interior lights and create semi-translucent views into some labs. The effect hints that a giant Japanese paper lantern has been plopped down on the corner of Ames and Amherst Streets in Cambridge.
It’s a distinct contrast to the dim and cozy den atmosphere of “the Cube,” the MIT Media Lab’s old space in the I.M. Pei-designed Wiesner Building. That space consisted of a series of rooms overlooking a multistory common area with minimal outside light. Keeping “the Cube” as inspiration, the new six-story building is connected to the Wiesner Building and consists of seven cubes awash in white walls, glass, and natural light. The staggered double-height units with glass walls allow various groups to look across, down, or up at one another. The cubes then form another cube around a common atrium.

Maki and his team have created a series of literal think tanks filled with professors, students, computers, and robots all working in tandem on future technology.
The cubes themselves, now referred to as labs, have retained the same creative and colorful preschool feel of the original Wiesner cube, with many of the usual players and odd projects-in-progress that the Media Lab has come to be known for.

In addition to housing new labs and offices for the MIT Media Lab organization, the building will also be home to several programs belonging to MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, the Jerome Lemelson Center for Inventive Thinking and the Okawa Center for Future Children. It also has a digital fabrication and machine shop, a lecture hall, a winter garden, a cafe, and conference rooms.

http://web.mit.edu
http://www.maki-and-associates.co.jp

Geliografic studio from Moscow is a crew of professional artists, illustrators and graphic designers, “sharing the same creative views”.
“Personal skills, experience and communism imagination meet here with the ability to work as a part of a team, thus providing the realization of the most challenging projects and the achievement of the highest efficiency”.

The Russian based illustration studio decided to mix classic still life paintings, with modern weapons.
Enjoy This KGB kitsch art !

http://www.geliografic.com

KR’s products gained notoriety through their association with his work in the street, the studio and his dripping ink aesthetics. Curated by Arkitip merges KR’s artistry with the Incase notebook sleeve, a signature piece within the Incase line, resulting in a refined version of the classic sleeve.

Curated by Arkitip is a project designed for Incase aimed at delivering artistically embellished Apple products to users who have an appreciation for the creative arts and technology. All artists are carefully chosen by Arkitip for their dedication to their respective art forms and unique points of view.

http://goincase.com
http://krink.com

And the winner is…Garamond, my “Sayf” typeface ! Yes !

www.matthewrobinson.co.uk
www.tomwrigglesworth.com

http://www.lockheedmartin.com
http://www.berkeleybionics.com

Yamakasi est un nom d’origine africaine (Lingala) qui signifie : Homme fort, corps fort, esprit fort…
Et c’est ce nom que les pionniers, à l’origine du mouvement ont choisi de donner à leur groupe.
L’esprit Yamak représente l’essence du travail sur les valeurs qui a unit les fondateurs Yamakasi entre eux dans une même recherche :

• Prendre la vie comment une aventure intérieure et respecter l’Homme.
• Respecter son corps par une bonne alimentation, par le sommeil et l’entraînement.
• Respecter la nature, par des “gestes verts” simples et anodins.
• Affronter l’inconnu pour se grandir.
• Rechercher la liberté de penser pour agir.
• S’affirmer afin d’agir au mieux dans notre monde.
• Combattre toute discrimination par l’exemplarité, l’intelligence et l’éducation.

http://www.add-academy.com

The beard has a special significance in Philadelphia culture and it is unlike any other city in America. In Philadelphia the beard is an expression of individuality, religious observance and civic pride.
“That’s what God gave us, hair on the face.” said Leroy Robinson Jr., a barber at New Identity Barbershop who has been cutting heads and beards in Philadelphia for 33 years.

Each man possesses the capability to grow a beard, and for each man, there is a reason motivating his choice to grow or to shave, to groom, trim or leave alone. The Sunni Beard is the story of one such beard, which is worn by many of Philadelphia’s Muslim converts, and is a prominent feature of chins, cheeks, and jowls throughout town.

In this clip, Chikodi Chima, Justin Colvin & Ben Piven investigates Philly’s signature facial hairstyle.

https://www.ezcracker.com

The Copenhagen Wheel made its debut today in Copenhagen, one of the most bicycle friendly cities in the world and the site of the current international talks on climate change regulations.The special wheel can be swapped in for any bike’s rear wheel, and includes other bells and whistles such as an odometer, a sensor to track air quality, and a GPS. The wheel can even talk to your iPhone though a Bluetooth connection so you can check your speed, direction, distance traveled, monitor traffic, and find your biking buddies. The wheel is expected to retail for between $500 and $1,000.

Check out the video below for a preview of the Copenhagen Wheel:

http://senseable.mit.edu/copenhagenwheel

Taken from 423 miles in space by the GeoEye-1 satellite on Nov. 16, 2009 during the Dubai Airshow 2009.

http://dubaiairshow.aero
http://www.geoeye.com

http://www.liittschwager.com

Nainawasu (9h) is a new capsule hotel that offers luxury in a minimum living space. The “9h” capsule hotel and all amenities were designed by Fumie Shibata of Design Studio S, which she founded in 1994. With her team, she defined the elements necessary for a “minimal transit space” in big cities in Japan. The product designer has been pursuing the “9h” project as a creative director for 3 years.
The first hotel will opened in December this year, located in Shimogyo-Ku, Kyoto, located on Teramachi Street between department store Fujii Daimaru and convenience store AMPM, two minutes walk from Kawaramachi station. The building itself will be 9 stories tall, will host 125 capsules, locker rooms, showers, and a lounge.
“A comfortable place to rest … 1 hour shower, sleep for 7 hours, have a one hour break / total 9h.” Guests can spend up to 17 hours in a single stay – the price for one night is ¥4900 ($54,-).

Each capsule includes Panasonic’s Advanced System for good sleeping by computerized control lighting. According to the time set, the light will wake you up.
The bed sheets are of the same quality as those that are used in a four-star hotel.

Japan’s first capsule hotel made its appearance in Osaka in 1979, and was designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa.

http://9hours.jp/

The Fire Scout unmanned helicopter got its first job—hunting drug smugglers.

MQ-8B became the first unmanned helo to conduct actual operations on a navy ship. The UAV left on an anti-narcotics mission when from a port in Florida on Monday. The USS McInerney (FFG-8) is no stranger to the unmanned aerial vehicle because it hosted it during developmental testing. A crew of Northrop Grumman engineers are on board to help the aircraft stay healthy.

The operational tests will help the Navy field rotorcraft UAVs on its Littoral Combat Ship, which is still in development.

http://www.as.northropgrumman.com/products/mq8bfirescout_navy/index.html

Dès l’âge de 4 ans, il s’intéresse déjà aux sports en débutant par le hockey.
Ses limites sont atteintes selon lui, mais arrive le skateboard qui lui apporte une sécrétion d’adrénaline hors du commun vu l’aspect technique et risqué de cette activité.
Devenu policier à la Sûreté du Québec en 2001, il continu à pousser son intérêt vers les sports extrêmes.
Suite à sa rencontre avec Yan Leconte et Mathieu Ledoux, membres de l’équipe Fast Motion, il commence alors à s’intéresser au monde du cinéma et des cascades. Ainsi débute sa passion pour la gymnastique, les arts martiaux et l’art du déplacement (parkour).
Il commence à pratiquer cette dernière discipline en ayant pour inspiration David Belle qu’il a aperçu sur le Web. Avec sa compréhension de ce sport et des valeurs qui l’entourent, il parvient à offrir un enseignement à des jeunes passionnés et rejoint les Yamakasi à Evry en France pour offrir des séminaires à des adeptes de la place.
Il rencontre aussi les membres de Parkour Generations et plusieurs autres traceurs expérimentés dont il tire profit. Suite à cela, il débute sa carrière de cascadeur professionnel en se rendant aux Etats-Unis pour collaborer avec les compagnies USANA et Bombardier. Avec l’intention d’élargir ses compétences, il s’adonne au motocross et au rollerblade (agressive in-line skating) tout en ne cessant de prôner l’entraînement par la méthode naturelle.
En somme, avec ses multiples habiletés et son intense désir d’inspirer les gens, Sébastien continu de construire sa voie de façon intense et passionnée à travers Fast Motion dont il est maintenant un membre à part entière.

http://www.fast-motion.tv