celebrate matt greene’s upcoming exhibition WE ARE THE DEAD
sunday march 27, 5-7 pm
beer, etc.
the womenΔτs building
1727 n. spring st.
(east of chinatown at the base of the spring street bridge, parking on side of building)
Philip Lamantia, 77, Surrealist Poet, Is Dead
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Philip Lamantia, the rapturous San Francisco poet who embraced Surrealism and later associated himself with the West Coast Beat community, died on March 7 at his apartment in San Francisco. He was 77.
The cause was heart failure, a spokesman for his publisher, City Lights Books, said.
“Philip Lamantia’s poems are about rapture as a condition,” the poet Tom Clark wrote in a review of Mr. Lamantia’s “Selected Poems, 1943-1966″ (City Lights, 1967) in The New York Times Book Review. “They are spiritual and erotic at the same time. Bright and dark, the enclosed polarities of devotion. St. Teresa and Rimbaud.”
Mr. Lamantia’s path to these poetic extremes was serpentine. Born in San Francisco on Oct. 23, 1927, to Nunzio, a produce broker, and Mary Tarantino Lamantia, both of whom immigrated from Sicily as children, he began writing Poe-like poems in elementary school and promoting social revolution in junior high, from which he was briefly expelled for “intellectual delinquency.”
In his freshman year in high school, he saw a retrospective exhibition of Dali and Mir?Ι¬?, which made such a powerful impression that he embraced the fantastical artistic and literary movement Surrealism.
After publishing his first book at 19, “Erotic Poems” (Bern Porter, 1946), Mr. Lamantia grew disillusioned with the New York scene and returned to San Francisco. He completed high school and enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, where he became part of the revolutionary left and studied subjects pertaining to Gnosticism, mysticism, eroticism and heretical thought. All the while he continued writing and publishing poems and articles.
He never graduated from Berkeley. In the 1950’s, he began to explore altered states of consciousness through hallucinogenic drugs, attending peyote rituals with various American Indian tribes. He traveled in France and Morocco, returning now and then to the United States, where he plunged himself into urban night life. He became associated with the Beat movement, although his work remained distinct from the Beats’ concerns with homosexual themes and everyday minutiae, continuing his own quest for the heterosexually erotic and the mystical.
By the time his “Selected Poems, 1943-1966″ was published, he was living in Spain, fighting depression, studying mathematics and writing intermittently.
In the remaining decades of his life he returned to San Francisco, lectured on poetry at San Francisco State University and San Francisco Art Institute, and took up American Indian and environmental causes.
In 1978, he married Nancy Joyce Peters, who became his editor at City Lights and who survives him.
His distinctive surrealistic poetry was collected in four more volumes “The Blood of the Air” (1970), “Becoming Visible” (1981), “Meadowlark West” (1986) and “Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems 1943-1993″ (1997), making a total of nine published in his lifetime.
His work commanded respect for inhabiting the realm of what he called “King Analogue/Queen Image/Prince Liberty. …” And he was, as Yves le Pellec, a French critic, put it, “a living link between French Surrealism and the American counterculture at its beginnings.”
Building materials, energy and communication infrastructure, 2003
‘Next Stop, Kiosk’, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia
A palafita — a South American house on stilts (sometimes called “a walking house”) - is balanced on top of a group of intersecting city kiosks. The K-67 kiosk was originally designed in the late 1960s as a mobile dwelling unit by the Ljubljana-based architect Sasa Maechtig.
Turning Trash Into Gold: A New Urban Alchemy
By CAROLE BRADEN
It is the sort of bright, bitterly cold afternoon when exposed fingers and faces instantly stiffen, but the turnout is good at a community workshop and toolshed in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. Eighteen hearty New Yorkers sit on red wooden benches, surrounded by homemade sawhorses and aging power tools.
They are here to attend Dumpster Diving 301, a course on fishing for free home-improvement materialsΔξthings like scratched doors and mismatched kitchen cupboardsΔξfrom construction waste bins. Yes, in a surprising twist on continuing education these students have paid $20 to learn how to pick through trash.
It is no revelation that one person’s junk can be another’s jewel. The art of combing garbage is the subject of two recent movies by the French director Agnes Varda, and Mother Earth News ran how-to’s aimed at hippies as early as 1970.
But few would have predicted the evolution of this scrappy practice into something bordering on chic. “Mongo: Adventures in Trash” (Bloomsbury, 2004) by Ted Botha offers New Yorkcentric tips from a book dealer who builds inventory by culling sidewalks and from a suburbanite who cruises Manhattan on bulk-garbage days, struggling with her desire to take home every orphan chair and lamp.
One Web site, dumpsterworld.com, provides a forum on hunting grounds and tactics, and dumpsterdiving.meetup.com lists 171 groups of trash pickers around the globe, 52 formed in the last year. The largest, NYC Dumpster Diving Aficionados, invites newbies along for monthly forays. Naturally, the practice has splintered into specialties. The students in the Gowanus seminar, sponsored by an “art combine” called the Madagascar Institute (www.madagascarinstitute.com), were do-it-yourselfers trying to cut construction costs by sorting through nail- and-grime-ridden rejectamenta.
Their leaders were two seasoned teachers, Omar Freilla and Maureen Flaherty.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of cheap,” said Mr. Freilla, 31, the director of an environmental group in the South Bronx called the Green Worker Cooperatives. He recommended canvassing high-rent neighborhoods like the Upper East Side and Upper West Side (where “a lot of perfectly good stuff gets chucked”), conjuring visions of tin ceiling panels wearing perfectly peeling paint and moldings with pre-World War II personality, all free for the taking.
“You think you can find handrails for staircases?” asked Loren Churchill, who identified himself as an actor and yogi and who clearly could not wait to venture among the glass shards and rotting shingles.
“You have to think differently when you use old materials,” Ms. Flaherty, 30, said. Dressed in blue coveralls, she sat on a footlocker-size “window seat,” which she constructed from a found wood-frame window with a cracked pane, plywood planks and a couple of old industrial door hinges.
She held up a length of snaggled oak flooring with an angry nail protruding from it and described, to the class’s delight, an air-powered gunlike machine that can easily blow nails, even bent ones, out of boards.
After removing the nails and sawing off the jagged ends, Ms. Flaherty said, “You can cover gaps with pretty molding that you’ve found and plug the nail holes with wood fill.” She says the effort knocks about 80 percent off the cost of a new wood floor.
Like a lot of other Dumpster divers, Ms. Flaherty and Mr. FreillaΔξwho said he and his wife plan to buy and restore a home in the South Bronx using found materialsΔξpractice the sport not only to conserve cash but also to decrease Earth-clogging waste.
The instructors devised the course after they met at a mixer held by the New York City chapter of Green Drinks International (www.greendrinks.org), a network of career environmentalists with outposts from Melbourne to Minneapolis. Mr. Freilla preaches the importance of reducing waste, even if it means lending an unofficial hand to contractors during demolition. Ms. Flaherty suggests keeping a watch for building permits and construction-size Dumpsters. For those who do not own a car or truck, she points out, a folding shopping cart may serve as a hauling assistant.
After a round of introductionsΔξthe workshop included a housing developer and a former Californian who said she has “long-range garbage vision” and roams in knee-high bootsΔξthe instructors declared it time to hit the streets. Ms. Flaherty, who had been out scouting that morning, led the way.
“You could do a New York kitchen with these,” she said as her followers gathered around institutional gray ceramic tiles piled on a sidewalk about 10 blocks away. Finding no takers, she walked briskly to a fenced-off dead end overlooking the Gowanus Canal. An area of rampant illegal dumpingΔξdespite community efforts to clean it upΔξthe canal and its shores, she said, often serve up good stuff. Slim pickings on this day, though, beyond a chipped square of slate.
On Fourth Street near Bond Street, behind a set-design and photography studio, the group encountered a trash bin overflowing with plywood strips. “These will make nice shadow box frames,” said one participant, who also announced plans to turn the slate piece into a corner shelf.
Several blocks farther, outside a house under construction, loomed a 30-cubic-yard Dumpster piled with square beams and molding scraps. After pulling themselves up to peer inside, some diversΔξthose who knew enough to wear old clothing, thick-soled boots and heavy work glovesΔξbegan to dig, handing down finds that included two small wood-frame windows and a genie-lamp light fixture with dents.
Trish Hicks, the Californian, showed it off. What are a few imperfections when a fixture is free?
Some defects should be warning signs, the instructors said. Tunnels in wood have usually been burrowed by termites; boards with water stains are often warped; and “the smell of cat urine does not go away,” Ms. Flaherty noted. She also suggested that gleaners with children carry lead-paint test kits, available at many hardware stores.
“If anybody wants to craft their treasures into something else, I can show you how to use the tools,” Ms. Flaherty said, ushering her shivering posse back to the workshop.
Some took her up on the offer. Others jumped into their cars and headed back to the scavenging sites in search of more perfectly good garbage.
IMAX theaters reject film over evolution
Some theaters in South believe ‘Volcanoes’ a tough sell
Wednesday, March 23, 2005 Posted: 9:48 AM EST (1448 GMT)
CHARLESTON, South Carolina (AP) — IMAX theaters in several Southern cities have decided not to show a film on volcanoes out of concern that its references to evolution might offend those with fundamental religious beliefs.
“We’ve got to pick a film that’s going to sell in our area. If it’s not going to sell, we’re not going to take it,” said Lisa Buzzelli, director of an IMAX theater in Charleston that is not showing the movie. “Many people here believe in creationism, not evolution.”
The film, “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea,” makes a connection between human DNA and microbes inside undersea volcanoes.
Buzzelli doesn’t rule out showing the movie in the future.
IMAX theaters in Texas, Georgia and the Carolinas have declined to show the film, said Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for Stephen Low, the film’s Montreal-based director and producer.
“I find it’s only in the South,” Serapiglia said.
Critics worry screening out films that mention evolution will discourage the production of others in the future.
“It’s going to restrain the creative approach by directors who refer to evolution,” said Joe DeAmicis, vice president for marketing at the California Science Center in Los Angeles and a former director of an IMAX theater. “References to evolution will be dropped.”
The Eden Project
Bodelva
St Austell
Cornwall PL24 2SG
United Kingdom
Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners 2001
The Eden Project successfully combines ecology, horticulture, science, art and architecture. It provides an informative and enjoyable experience while promoting ways to maintain a sustainable future in terms of human global dependence on plants and trees. The exhibits include over one hundred thousand plants representing five thousand species from many of the climate zones of the world.
The organically inspired architecture is inventive, appropriate and original.
Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners were chosen to submit a proposal for the architectural design because of their experience in creating the large glass roof structure at Waterloo International Terminal in London. The challenge for the Waterloo project had been to create a roof structure that accommodated the curved shape of the railway tracks.
The challenge for the Eden project was different: the buildings needed to provide completely enclosed environments for key global microclimates; the site was a remote clay pit in Cornwall that was continually moving and changing shape; and the building needed to provide large uninterrupted ground space for the plants and trees.
As the design team searched for the most effective and interesting way to enclose the planned environments the organically inspired dome-shaped biome emerged as a strong idea, with the surfaces made up of geometric shapes. Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners worked closely with Anthony Hunt Associates Ltd and Mero Plc to develop the structure and define the lengths of each steelwork section via a 3D computer model. This enabled each section of the steelwork frame to be fabricated off-site and assembled in its unique position on-site matching precisely within the steel framework.
The final architectural and structural design is hugely efficient, providing maximum strength with minimum steelwork and maximum volume with minimum surface area. The transparent hexagonal membranes transmit more light than glass and the largest biome spans more than one hundred meters without requiring internal supports - allowing complete freedom for the landscape architects and horticulturalists.
John Perrin 2002¬
How to visit
The Eden Project is located east of St.Austell, Cornwall, UK, signposted from the A30, A390 and A391
For more information call +44 (0)1726 811911 or visit the Eden Project web site which has comprehensive visitor information at www.edenproject.com.
