I have been writing about the ultra-expensive condominium Museum Tower cooking the Nasher sculpture center the same way a bully with a magnifying glass burns the ants on the sidewalk: here here
and here
The New York Times now has an article on the issue,
There are a couple of interesting quotes. First, from the Los Angeles based architect that designed this monstrocity:
Scott Johnson, the Los Angeles architect who designed Museum Tower, said he was willing to consider remedies but that the Nasher also had to be open-minded. “My responsibility is to fully vet solutions vis-à-vis Museum Tower — that’s my building,” he said. “But I can’t say sitting here now that the Nasher may not need to do something on their end.”
So, you see his concern for the neighbor (The Museum) that actually made his project (The Museum Tower) possible. I would imagine it would have been a good idea to “fully vet” his design before the thing was built, don’t you?
And also, a fact I did not know, that helps to emphasize the whole political disgustedness of the whole thing:
Complicating matters is that the $200 million Museum Tower is owned by the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, on whose board sit four members of the City Council.
Ok, that makes it even more clear how the developers knew they could get away with this without the city doing a thing to stop them. Remember, none of this went into action until Raymond Nasher died – then the powers that be moved in to devour the carcass of his philanthropic vision.
The final word is from the livid Renzo Piano… who just might know a little about this sort of thing.
“By doing this, they kill what they use to sell it,” Mr. Piano said.
I think that, right now, the tower should be requred to change its name (Maybe to “Death Star Condominium Tower”) and to remove all reference to the Nasher Museum from its sales pitch (where it, of course, figures very prominantly). Actually, they should be required to warn their potential residents of the skin cancer danger poised by the neighbor next door due to the reflected sunlight.
The Museum Tower Condominiums tower over Tony Cragg’s “Lost in Thought”
The news is spreading. Also, as the city prepares to open their much-ballyhooed park that has been built over the Woodall Rogers freeway – it has been “discovered” that the glare from the tower raises the temperature in the park significantly. Now, everyone is getting pissed off – though not as much as me.
There are some updates:
– D Magazine has done an extensive and interesting article about the tower and the politics behind it. Read this… it is fascinating stuff – even if you don’t give a damn about Dallas: D Magazine – The Towering Inferno How Museum Tower threatens the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Woodall Rodgers roofdeck park, two of the most prized assets of the city’s vaunted Arts District.
Finally, the chairman of the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Trustees has a video saying that they have everything under control. He says they have been unfairly blamed for the problem. – He makes a good speech, but the building is still there – cooking everything within reach of its reflected laser beams. He says he’ll fix it – I’ll believe it when I see it.
It bugs me that he talks about all these architects, consultants, and experts they have hired. How about Renzo Piano, the architect of the Nasher. He has made his opinion very clear and he isn’t happy. It sounds to me like the Dallas Police and Fire Pension fund has hired a bunch of hacks and are trying to convince us they know more that the Pritzker Prize winner.
During the week I sometimes see something cool surfing around and make a note to put a link to it up on my friday blog entry. But a day later the thing has gone viral, everybody knows about it, and I have to take it off.
Here’s one of those – you’ve probably seen it, but if you haven’t, you should.
ALL ABOUT COFFEE:
What is Coffee?
The History of Coffee
Ten Steps to Coffee
How to Store Coffee
How to Brew Coffee
The Value of Coffee
Coffee Recipes
Roasting Types
Coffee From the World
From the Seed to the Cup
We all have read and heard enough bad advice to fill the oceans to overflowing. This, on the other hand, may be the best advice I have ever heard… ever.
My favorite Internet radio station is Radio Paradise. They play a wide variety of music, all of it good. Every now and then, something comes on that makes me sit up and listen – then find out who and what it was. This was one of those times.
This has (as of when I’m writing this) over one hundred fifty million hits. I suppose you have already seen it. On the odd chance that you haven’t – here it is anyway. It deserves the hits.
Next to my table at one of my favorite coffee places was this 3D photograph with a pair of glasses attached by a piece of brown twine. Pretty cool (though the twine was a little too short and it was hard to see the full effect). I liked it better than Avatar.
Work hard and sacrifice and you can send your children to an elite private university. That’s my son, Lee, in the following video. He’s the one in the Red Suit. I always wondered who did stuff like that.
Hey, whatever gets you into the final four.
Sometimes, I dream of a life led like this:
Unfortunately, this is only a dream, my real life is like this:
“Are you casting asparagus on my cooking?”
I’m not a huge fan of Titanic (even though I did like it more than I thought I would) and have no intention of seeing the 3D version. However, I am amused at the one change they made in the movie. Apparantly after (spoiler alert) the boat sinks, they had the wrong starfield – plus it was reversed for the second half of the sky. An astronomer was enough of a pest to get it changed in the 3D version.
I am hard at work on the cover for my book of short stories. I shouldn’t care, nobody looks at the cover of Kindle books anyway – but fear based procrastination is rampant. At any rate, here’s a nice TED talk on designing book covers.
Sips Card brings independent fiction and local coffee shop/bar venues together. Customers can find Sips Cards at participating coffee shop-like venues. Each card contains a QR code, loaded with a short story from an independent writer meant to last as long as their drink. The cards are venue specific and include their business information as well as that issue’s author, story title, and website.
For my own reasons (which some of you may know) I have always wondered what a severed head in a shopping bag might look like. Thanks to Helen Taylor, now I know.
I bet it’s heavier than you would think.
A head in a shopping bag
Finally, a French Scopitone. It’s another odd France Gall offering and has three creepy male dancers with even creepier sideburns… like her classic Bebe Requin.
In his defense of Obamacare, the Solicitor General quoted from the Preamble to the Constitution. I’m sorry, but I wasn’t immediately familiar with the exact wording of the Preamble – but I found this video that explains it all.
April 14th is Ciclovia de Dallas – where the Houston Street Viaduct will be closed to traffic and open only to bicycles. Looks like fun – another bridge party.
I love the idea of local folks still doing this sort of thing. I remember when I was a little kid I’d visit the newspaper office in the tiny town out in the wheat fields where my family was from. He set the paper in linotype and I loved watching the lead letter slugs being made. I remember being amazed at how hot the slugs were when he could pick them up (his hands were so callused).
A really interesting article from the New York Times on how reading fiction can improve our minds.
Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.
I found these passages particularly provocative:
The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.
Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.
The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.
As more power, faster processor, fancier features are added to smartphones, the battery life becomes less and less. This is the one problem that will limit the post-laptop technological revolution. If your battery doesn’t work, your phone (or tablet) is useless.
The trouble with batteries, as everyone who makes phones will tell you, is that they don’t follow Moore’s Law. Batteries are an ancient technology that depend on chemistry that scientists have already pretty much optimized.
Very interesting article. I wonder if we will see a bifurcation in the phone market, with folks carrying both an old-technology phone for voice and text only (I only have to charge my crappy work Blackberry in my car during my commute) and another smart phone or tablet or in-between form factor (and leave this turned off most of the time) for all the other goodies.
#1 One California town is actually considering making it illegal to smoke in your own backyard.
#2 In Louisiana, a church was recently ordered to stop giving out water because it did not have a permit to do so.
#3 In the United States it is illegal to operate a train that does not have an “F” painted on the front. Apparently without that “F” we all might not know where the front of the train is.
#4 In many U.S. states is it now illegal to collect rain that falls from the sky on to your own property.
#5 In America today it is illegal to milk your cow and sell the milk to your neighbor. If you do this, there is a good chance that federal agents will raid your home at the crack of dawn.
#6 In Washington D.C. it is illegal not to recycle cat litter.
#7 It is illegal to give a tour of the monuments in Washington D.C. without a license.
#8 In the United States it is illegal to sell natural cures for cancer – even if they work.
#9 In the state of Massachusetts it is illegal to deface a milk carton.
#10 In the state of Alabama, bear wrestling is completely illegal.
#11 In Fairbanks, Alaska it is illegal to give alcoholic beverages to a moose.
#12 In Lake Elmo, Minnesota it is illegal to sell pumpkins or Christmas trees that are grown outside city limits.
#13 There is a federal law that makes it illegal to be “annoying” on the Internet.
#14 If you register with a false name on MySpace or Facebook you could potentially “spend five years in federal prison“.
#15 In Hazelwood, Missouri it is illegal for little girls to sell girl scout cookies in the front yards of their own homes.
#16 All over the United States lemonade stands run by children are being shut down because they do not have the proper permits.
#17 In Florida, it is illegal to bring a plastic butter knife to school.
#18 In San Juan Capistrano, California it is illegal to hold a home Bible study without a “conditional use permit“.
#19 In the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania it is illegal to make even a single dollar from a blog unless you buy a $300 business license.
From the “I really wish I had thought of that,” department. Of course, the music is the “American Beauty” theme – but the fabric looks better than a plastic bag.
When I watch this, I think of what I know about chaotic systems and boundary conditions and I wonder if a setup like this could be designed to be “stable” – in that the fabric would continue to move in a random way, but staying within the boundary of the circle of fans – for an indeterminate time… like years. Imagine a museum exhibit that simply did this, day after day, week after week, for a year. I like to think of it still thrashing around in the dark, after the museum has closed, still dancing in inanimate beauty with nobody watching. Or, even better, I imagine a lonely museum security guard, at four in the morning, sitting there, looking at it, dreaming his own personal unique dreams.
And two pieces of cloth, plus my favorite Sigur Ros tune.
8 million hits – so you might have already seen this…. but even if you did, trust me, it’s worth watching again.
I loved Hee-Haw in high school. It was on in Managua, dubbed into Spanish (except for the songs and music). Trust me, Hee-Haw does not translate well. Still, I’d forgotten how much I loved this little ditty until I stumbled across it on a blog the other day.
5. “Travelin’ Band”/”Who’ll Stop the Rain” (1969) was denied by Simon and Garfunkel‘s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” No reason for complaint there, really.
4. “Lookin’ Out My Back Door”/”Long as I Can See the Light” (1970) was held off by Diana Ross and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” No shame in that, either.
3. “Green River” (1969) could not overcome the Archies and “Sugar Sugar.” We like “Sugar Sugar” more than most people do, but c’mon, that’s crazy.
2. “Bad Moon Rising” (1969) stalled at #2 behind “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet” by Henry Mancini, which is pretty close to the exact opposite of “Bad Moon Rising.”
1. “Proud Mary” (1969) was blocked for a week by Sly and the Family Stone‘s “Everyday People,” which is a great record and a worthy rival. But the next week, Tommy Roe‘s “Dizzy” jumped over both of them to #1. And that is a crime not merely against rock, but against art itself.
In one sense, the rule of the law must be consistent with at least some form of public administration. Over the centuries, governments have had to enforce the criminal law, tear down firetraps, and issue driver’s licenses. It is often not easy to decide what disabilities prevent people from driving or what qualifications must be met to operate a heavy rig. But with conscientious officials, these focused tasks can be accomplished. Today’s “administrative state,” however, goes far beyond this modest level of public administration.
This guy found Eva in an album of 60s and 70s polaroids at a Berlin flea market. She appears prominently throughout the album, and his curiosity about her life led to Tuesdays with Eva, which began with this post.
I remember winning a cheap pocketknife in a claw machine when I was a little kid. I think the guy running the machine (it was at a fair, not a restaurant or something) set it so I would win. After all these years I still smile when I think of the clunk that knife made falling down the chute.
Bill Chance 