2026.10.20
"Look, it's gray matter!" even in color
Philadelphia Museum of Art 2026.10.15
2025.10.20
search results
 
 
 
...plus, there's no mention of the Barberini Faun in this 2009 exhibition catalogue, either
...at least I have something to be happy about...lol
2024.10.20
451 Rhawn Gallery
 
2009.10.20
Really, what boundaries have you pushed?
I've never personally been committed to a psych ward, but there was a time when I well knew all the steps to get someone committed, and have indeed succeeded in having someone committed many, many times. As a result, I have visited a variety of different psych wards on many, many occasions, and, hence, I have often visited that boundary between sanity and insanity. Of course, it is an unfortunate place, but, more to the point, it's never comfortable, and sometimes even down-right scary.
You don't play with the boundary there either. You don't push it, and you certainly don't try to blur it. You learn to keep it steady and clear, for the benefit of both parties.
Really, what boundaries have you pushed?
phantom opera buffs, 1985
2008.10.20
Architecture in Critical Condition, continued
After reading about Liszt, I read about Lister which was all about antiseptic operating procedure origins--interesting coincidence.
Another possibility for “Waiting Room” is to tackle the Working Title Museum.
Now, what is “Operation a Success; Patient Dead” going to be about? I have no idea right now. Is it a joke like the expression of the chapter title itself? Is it a paradox? How is architecture (today) a paradox? Does it have to do with really being metabolic? Being creative/destructive? That would certainly be a fine lead, and I’ll have to go over my metabolic material and maybe just formalize it all.
“Malpractice Case: Houses” is all about my zany domestic architecture designs and how they got to be that way.
“Eternal Wrest” will have to do with reenacting with a twist as a constant generator of originality.
2004.10.20
Re: Pop Life: Los Super Elegantes
Found this while doing The Odds of Ottopia research:
In the article "The Day Pop Art Died," Katherine Kuh maintains that on the opening day of the World's Fair, April 22, 1964, "Pop art died a natural and undramatic death, inadvertently eliminated by Robert Moses when he turned the New York World's Fair into a gigantic spectacle that out-pops all competition. Instead of interpreting the banality of our mass produced environment, the pop artist merely reproduces it. . . . At the Fair, the model so completely overwhelms the copy, as to make the latter obsolete... No one interested in Pop Art should hiss the hotdog stands... each topped by what resembles huge scoops of glistening whipped cream . . . or the eighty foot tire that the U.S. Rubber Company has turned into a ferris wheel."
Katherine Kuh has been a part of The Odds of Ottopia since 2004.03.22.
Re: Pop Life: Los Super Elegantes
from: www.carolmoore.net/sfm/jdl.html
A tragic event that galvanized American Muslims and Arab Americans was the murderous attack on the Ismail al-Faruqi family last May. Dr. Ismail Raji al-Faruqi was a prominent Islamic scholar at Temple University. On May 27 a knife-wielding man broke into the Faruqi home in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, and viciously attacked al-Faruqi, his wife, Lois, and their daughter, Anmar al-Zein. Al-Faruqi and his wife died from their wounds and the daughter survived, but required 200 stitches to close her wounds....
At about the same time, ADC published an eight-page "Special Report" on the murders, including a detailed account of the crime, its victims, and the current status of the investigation. Although nothing was missing from the house, some investigators working on the case believe the murders resulted from a bungled burglary attempt; however, the police lieutenant in charge of the investigation described the incident as an assassination, saying that "someone took it upon themselves" to kill al-Faruqi. In view of the rise of violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim incidents in recent years, the report suggests that the murders could very well have been politically motivated. In addition, the report mentions al-Faruqi's status as a visible pro-Palestinian spokesman, notes the strength of the Philadelphia chapter of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), and cites an article about al-Faruqi's anti-Zionist positions in the Near East Report (the weekly newsletter of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee) as evidence that the professor was in the "zone of danger" described by the FBI earlier this year. The FBI, however, has not become directly involved in the case because it sees no evidence of a federal offense.
Related information from dawanet.com/history/amermuslimhist
His murder was predicated without name by the president of Jewish Defense League one week before his death in the Village Voice, New York by claiming that within a week an outspoken Palestinian professor will be eliminated.
acceptable margin of error?
On 17 July 2004 Rita Novel reported, among other things, that...
Marie Antoinette is getting a real kick out of how Martha Stewart is reenacting her these days--so Hameau Tableau. She's also wondering if 6 October will again have some significance.
Maria Antoinette and the Royal family were forcibly removed from Versailles 6 October 1789.
Martha Stewart began her prison sentence 8 October 2004.
2002
Denis Diderot "Encyclopedia"
Diderot, Denis. "Encyclopedia." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Philip Stewart. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.004 (accessed 20 October 2026). Originally published as "Encyclopédie," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 5:635–648A (Paris, 1755).
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Why should it not be possible on the same looms to fill the background of the woolen tapestries made by needle, leaving only the space of the design to be detailed, empty and ready for hand completion, either in wool or in silk? This would offer the same rapidity of execution for such works on the loom, as on the hosiery machine for making stitches. I invite artisans to reflect on that.
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Could one not extend the minor art of printing with drilled characters to the printing or copying of music? The ruled paper would be available. The staves of the paper would thus be traced onto the small blades of the characters. By using these lines and even the open parts of the characters, these characters could easily be aligned on the staves. The bars separating the measures, those that tie the notes together, and all the other musical signs would be among these characters. The blades could be given widths varying with the notes' values; consequently the notes would occupy on the stave a space proportional to their value, and the measures would correspond rigorously with all the others, on other staves, without the least attention on the musician's part. Once that is done, you would have a frame holding each stave, which would then be applied in turn to as many different sheets of paper as desired, which would yield an equal number of copies of the same piece. The only care that must be taken, would be to raise or lower with a small instrument the little blades which move amongst themselves, in those places where they do not correspond as exactly as they need to, either to the lines, or to the spaces between them. I shall leave the judgment of this thought to my friend M. Rousseau.
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Finally, a last type of reference, which can be either material or verbal, is that I would willingly call satirical or epigrammatic: such, for example, is one to be found in one of our articles where, following some pompous praise, one reads: see Cowl. The farcical word capuchon , and what one finds in the article Capuchon, could lead one to suspect that the pompous praise was merely ironic, and that the article needs to be read cautiously, carefully weighing the terms employed.
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I would not wish to omit such references entirely, because sometimes they are useful. They can silently target certain kinds of foolishness, as can philosophical references against certain prejudices. It is sometimes a subtle and delicate means of fending off slanders, virtually without taking the defensive, and unmasking grave personalities qui curios simulant et bacchanalia vivunt. But I do not like them to be frequent; I do not even like the one I have cited. Frequent allusions of this nature would shroud a work in darkness. Posterity, which is unaware of petty circumstances that are unworthy of being passed on, no longer senses the shrewd appropriateness, and views these words that amuse us as childishness. Instead of producing a serious, philosophical dictionary, we descend into triviality. All things considered, I would rather the truth be stated unambiguously, and that, if by misfortune or chance we are pitted against men who are dishonored, ignorant, and immoral, whose name has practically become a dishonest word, we should abstain from naming them out of shame or charity, or else we should fall on them with with no holds barred, scold them ignominiously for their vices, remind them brutally of their station and duties, and pursue them with the bitterness of Persius and the bile of Juvenal or Buchanan.
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I know it is said of authors who have given full vent to their indignation: This is terrible! People should not be treated so harshly! These are crude insults not worth reading , and other similar words which have been uttered at all times about all works in which ridiculousness and viciousness have been depicted most powerfully, and which we read today with the greatest pleasure. Let us explain this contradiction in our judgments. At the moment when these woeful productions were published, all the wicked, in alarm, feared for their safety: the more wicked the man, the louder he complained. To the satirist he protested the age, station, and dignity of the person, and a host of petty and local considerations which fade by the day and disappear by the end of the century. Do you think that when Juvenal delivered Messalina to the porters of Rome, and Persius took a lowly lackey, and transformed him into a grave personage, a respectable magistrate, the legal profession in the one case, and gallant ladies in the other, did not cry out, saying that those barbs were horribly and criminally indecent? If you don't think so, you are wrong. But the momentary circumstances are forgotten; posterity sees only the folly, the ridiculousness, the vice and viciousness, covered with ignominy, and delights in it as an act of justice. He who censures vice lightly to me is not friend enough of virtue. One is the more indignent at injustice as one is farther from committing it; and it is a reprehensible weakness that prevents us from showing for cruelty, baseness, envy, duplicity, the deep and powerful loathing that every honest man must feel.
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Whatever the nature of references, there cannot be too many of them. It is better there be too many than that any be overlooked. One of the most immediate effects, and of the most important advantages of the multiplicity of references, will be first , to perfect the word list. An essential article is related to so many other articles that it would be nearly impossible for one among the laborers not to have referenced them. Whence it follows that it cannot be forgotten; for a word which is merely accessory in one subject matter is the important one in another. But this is true in the material as well as the verbal. One person mentions a phenomenon, and refers to the articles specific to that phenomenon; another a quality, and refers to the substantive article; this one a system, that one an operation, and each one makes his reference to the appropriate location, not because of what it contains, for he has not seen a copy of it, but on his presumption of what it must contain, to illuminate and complement the article on which he is working. Thus at every moment grammar will refer to dialectic, dialectic to metaphysics, metaphysics to theology, theology to jurisprudence, juridprudence to history, history to geography and chronology, chronology to astronomy, astronomy to geometry, geometry to algebra, algebra to arithmetic, etc. One extremely important precaution is not to think so highly of one's colleague as to think he will have overlooked nothing. There are so many other reasons besides bad faith, either to get an article by, or for not treating everything that the object includes, that one cannot be too careful in referring to it.
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It is, secondly , to avoid repetitions. Every science overlaps with others: they are two continuous branches off a single trunk. He who composes an opus does not enter abruptly into his subject, does not close himself strictly within it, does not leave it abruptly: he is obliged to anticipate terrain adjoining his; its consequences often take him onto another contiguous terrain on the opposite side; and how many other excursions are necessary in the body of the work? What is the purpose of the forewords, introductions, prefaces, exordia, episodes, digressions, and conclusions? If we separated scrupulously from a book what is outside the subject it treats, we would almost always reduce it to a quarter of its volume. What does the encyclopedic linkage do? Just that harsh division. It sets the limits of a subject so firmly that there remains in an article only what is essential. A single new idea generates volumes under the pen of a writer; those volumes reduce to a few lines under the pen of an encyclopedist. We are subjected unawares to what is strictest and most precise in the geometricians' method. We progress rapidly. One page always presents something different from the preceding or subsequent page. The need of a proposition, a fact, an aphorism, a phenomenon, a system, requires no more than a single citation in an encyclopedia , just as in geometry. The geometrician refers from one theorem or problem to another, and the encyclopedist from one article to another. And so it is that two types of opus, which seem so very different in nature, come by the same means to create a most dense, tightly knit, and continuous whole. What I say is so precisely true that the method by which mathematics is treated in our dictionary is the same followed for other topics. From this point of view there is no difference between an article on algebra and an article on theology.
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Thanks to encyclopedic ordering, the universality of knowledge, and the frequency of references, the connections grow, the links go out in all directions, the demonstrative power is increased, the word list is complemented, fields of knowledge are drawn closer together and strengthened; we perceive either the continuity or the gaps in our system, its weak sides, its strong points, and at a glance on which objects it is important to work for one's own glory, or for the greater utility to humankind. If our dictionary is good, how many still better works it will produce!
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But how will an editor ever verify these references, if he does not have his whole manuscript in front of him? This condition seems to me so important that I will pronounce that he who has the first sheet of an encyclopedia printed, without having read his copy twenty times over in advance, does not realize the extent of his functions; that he is unworthy of directing such a lofty enterprise; or that bound, as we have been, by unforeseeable events, he found himself suddenly engaged in this labyrinth, and constrained by honor to extricate himself as best he could.
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An editor will never give to the whole a certain degree of perfection, if he only gets the various sections successively. If that happens it would be harder to judge the overall universal dictionary, than the general ordering of a piece of architecture, of which only the separate parts could be seen one after the other. How could there not be references overlooked? How many useless, or false, or ridiculous ones will fail to escape him? An author inserts a reference by way of proof, at least that is his intention, and it happens that what he refers to is an objection. The article which another has cited, either will not exist at all, or will include nothing analogous to the topic at issue. Another drawback is that a part of the manuscript may be missing only because the author has been writing as the work was being printed; whence it will occur that, abusing references to consult his leisure or listen to his sloth, the subject matter will be ill distributed, the first volumes lacking it altogether, the last ones overloaded, and the natural order entirely distorted. But there is worse to fear, which is that the laborer, overwhelmed at the end by a prodigious number of articles referred from one letter to the next, will mangle them, or even not do them at all, putting them off for a later edition. He will hesitate all the less to take this latter path, that by then the fortune of the work will be made, or it will not happen. But what a dilemma will we not face if it happens that the colleague who advances his work only for the next printing, dies or falls victim to a long illness! Experience has unfortunately taught us to fear such events, although the public has not yet noticed them.
2001.10.20
Re: Beauty parlor
Beauty (parlor) is in the eye of the beholder.
There is a boot-leg beauty parlor just two doors down from me. From what I can gather this is the beauty parlor of choice for Northeast Philadelphia's turn-of-the-millennium Portuguese immigrant population. (Between the mid 1980s and the mid 1990s there were over a dozen Portuguese families living on my block, and now they've almost all moved on.) When the proprietress and her family first moved here in 1992, I noticed lots of work was being done in their basement, but I only guessed they were making some kind of den or family room down there. About a year later I was eating lunch in my kitchen, and I heard someone walk in my back door downstairs. I got up to look down the steps, and there was this older [Portuguese] woman very surprised to see me. Then she simply asked, "Fixa da hair?" That's when it was all revealed to me, so I escorted the woman down to my second neighbor's back door, and said, "Here, fixa da hair."
2000.10.20
evolution in architecture
Do not the effects of war perhaps have an even greater effect upon the extinction of architectural styles? For example, has not the US government's wars of 100 years ago upon the Native Americans rendered "native" American
architecture extinct? Additionally, did not European colonialism come very close to bringing many "native" architectures of the world to near extinction? One might even make a case that Western Europe and Japan would not be as architecturally modern as they now are were it not for the overall urban destruction of WWII.
There is also the reality that the ballooning world population has an enormous effect on how humanity reconfigures the planet. And today, doesn't the "creative destruction" of capitalism, ie, the underlying process of planned obsolescence permeating ALL consumer goods, including architecture, make for "styles" that are literally "here today and gone tomorrow?" [Is "corporeal" capitalism then THE "fittest" "style" because not only does it make money for humanity, but it also makes sure humanity spends the money it makes?]
Perhaps when it come to human activities like architecture and the subsequent creation and destruction of styles, it is not so much an evolutionary "survival of the fittest", rather simply an imaginative and concrete manifestation of the (human physiological) metabolic process.
OR
Might it just be true that the "whiter" humanity thinks, the more it manifests extinctions?
1999.10.20
ideas
...the museum as a communication machine.
1993.10.20
Untitled
1984.10.20
Fassbinder is dead of the unfinished manifesto
1952.10.20
1952. Monday, New York City
"The King and the Queen arrived unannounced a few days ago, accompanied by Adam and Eve," writes Marcel to Louise and Walter Arensberg referring to Le Roi et la Reine entourés de Nus vites [9.10.1912], which he painted on the back of an earlier picture, Le Paradis. Since the donation of the collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art [27.12.1950], the restoration work on the paintings continues. "I must say that Miss Adler did a splendid job removing all the black paint," Marcel remarks appreciatively, adding that for him to restore Paradise, "all that is necessary is to retouch the nudes on the areas where the paint is actually missing..." Marcel finds the background landscape "in good condition and very luminous".
As Walter had to undergo a third sinus operation recently, Marcel is concerned about his health: "Are you all right for good?" he enquires.
Ephemerides
1942.10.20
1942. Tuesday, New York City
In the wake of "First Papers of Surrealism" inaugurated the previous Wednesday, Peggy Guggenheim's new gallery Art of this Century at 30 West 57th Street opens with a benefit evening for the American Red Cross. Frederick Kiesler has transformed the space and designed an elaborate, theatrical showcase for Peggy's collection [22.7.1942], The catalogue, which Andre Breton has taken in hand but is not ready in time for the opening, includes
Duchamp's English version of his text "SURcenSURE" (originally published in L'Usage de la Parole, December 1939).
As well as showing Jeune Homme triste dans un Train [17.2.1913], which Peggy has recently acquired from Walter Pach, Kiesler has the privilege of making the first installation of Duchamp's Boîte-en-Valise [7.1.1941] for public exhibition. In a glass case which is set into the wall of a corridor opposite a conveyor belt of Paul Klees, Kiesler's idea of presentation recalls the "television" room which he made for the Société Anonyme at the Anderson Galleries [25.1.1927]: to the left of a huge, spoked wheel incorporating a spiral motif is a peephole which, as the wheel is turned, reveals to the viewer, one by one, fourteen images from the Valise.
Ephemerides
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