This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

Wow, the irony. The third, and final, presidential debate was held in the Gammage Auditorium designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959. Gammage apparently was originally intended as an opera house in Baghdad. Here are some photographs.

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

Today is Pulaski Day here in New York. Which meant, among other things, a parade down Fifth Avenue. For those in the know, everyday is Pulaski Day in my neighborhood. However, yesterday was a special opportunity which only comes along once a year – unless a Polish football/rugby/cricket/insert-sport-here team is playing that day. This special event calls for old and young Polish citizens of New York to don the red and white, and apply face paint wherever needed. Once they completed girding their loins in as many types of red and white articles as possible, it is time to run amuck in the street yelling, “Polska, Polska!” and watch the Pulaski Day Parade travel down the Avenue. Chanting, singing, and dancing all commence – the parade seems to be more “large groups of people walking down the street” than “large, homecoming-type floats being driven by John Deere tractors.” Oh, and Polka, lots and lots of Polka. This dancing and shouting cycle goes on and on throughout the day, until the shouts of Polish glee are heard in all sections of Gotham – Puerto Rico Parade ain’t got nothing on Pulaski Day. When the celebrants grow tired and retreat homes, they do not stop the celebrations: they ride home safely encumbered in Polish-flag adorned cars, honking all the way home. And honking all night long. Did I mention, all night long?
Either way, here is a picture I took from Pulaski Day 2004.
Happy Pulaski Day!

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

An interesting study comparing residents of sedentary cities/suburbs with active cities has shown that Living in the Suburbs Can Make You Sick:

An adult living somewhere like Atlanta, with its spread-out suburbs and car-heavy culture, will have a health profile that looks like that of someone who lives in Seattle — but who is four years older, the study found.
And the culprit seems to be exercise, or the lack of it, the researchers report in the October issue of the journal Public Health.

I am sure there is some sort of trade off, however, of living in the city; noise and air pollution in urban areas (such as New York) most definitely affect health. But, how much this is offset by constantly walking everywhere and eating a wide variety of foods? Just a gut reaction, is that the improved overall health via exercise and diet far outweigh the environmental contaminations.

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

I choose not to comment on the third anniversary of September 11th.
I was enjoying life, the company of my friends, and loved ones.
I went to the US Open for the first time; I was experiencing the joys of life.
I’m not callous or forgetful, it is in fact, quite the opposite. I have to live with the loss every time I look downtown, or though my little park on the way to work, or across the bridge, or walking in the Village, or on the BQE. There are thousands of little things that remind me of that day.
The loss New York feels happens everyday – it is continual. We are reminded of it when armed troops protect our trains. Or when quintessential “New York Moments” turn into wondering if the man with 30 binoculars looking at the United Nations building is a terrorist. It is seeing a bag on the subway platform, telling a police man, and him telling you it was his; it is Emergency Service officers walking around the grounds of a sporting event which jar you back to three years ago.
Without living here, the rest of the country cannot possibly understand this. September 11th is but a day for many people, but it ebbs and flows here every day. How can we heal if we are constantly reminded of the loss? But we do, and we don’t forget, but we move on with our lives.
But this loss is nothing compared to the families who sustained real loss three years ago. This is why I didn’t comment on that day, but listened to the bells toll out four times in the morning. And heard the recitation of names. And looked up at night to those two beautiful pillars of light, pointing heaven bound toward those who died that day.
It is a time to remember, but it is time to live.
Today is September 12th.

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

The Times has an article about women wearing miniskirts titled, New York Region > The M Line and the Hemline: Miniskirt Protocols” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/03/nyregion/03miniskirts.html?ex=1251864000&en=18640b8fe220bca8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland”>The M Line and the Hemline: Miniskirt Protocols. Because mini’s are all the rage (especially the short frilly ones) it is almost impossible to go through a day without a woman showing the goods when on the subway. The subway is a veritable obsticle course of not showing yourself off. It is almost unavoidable – think of the physics involed! Short amounts of fabric, bending at the waist and knees, not to mention going up stairs, all add to the degree of difficulty and the danger of wearing a mini. On an unrelated note, the article has a picture of a model named Heather Marks, but her face has been cropped out.

Heather Marks, 16, is a professional model. She did not want her face in the newspaper, but she did display her method for keeping subway decorum.

I found this odd, because there wasn’t anything that riske about what she said, or what she was wearing. It was standard prosti-tot fashion (young girls dressing up like prostitutes) that many of the girls/women here wear. What is funny though, is that it took all of 1 second to google Heather Marks to find informtion about a Canadian model who also works in New York. The power of google.
My opinion? Women who put on a short miniskirt, take on the knowledge that sooner or later, you will flash someone. Again, it’s unavoidable – you are the one who put on that tiny skirt, you have to live with the consequences. You might as well just pick a good pair of underwear, and hope for the best. Sorry ladies, fashion is a bitch.

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

Mayor Bloomberg, displaying an acute level of hyperbole:

It is true that a handful of people have tried to destroy our city by going up and yelling at visitors here because they don’t agree with their views,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Think about what that says. This is America, New York, cradle of liberty, the city for free speech if there ever was one and some people think that we shouldn’t allow people to express themselves. That’s exactly what the terrorists did, if you think about it, on 9/11. Now this is not the same kind of terrorism but there’s no question that these anarchists are afraid to let people speak out.

Nice painting with a wide brush, Mr Mayor. why don’t you talk about how your police department held detanees longer than the permissible 24 hours? Or that it took a state judge order their release three times before you did? It isn’t like you weren’t forewarned about the amount of protesters. Commissioner Kelly was talking about 1,000 arrests a day, so you knew there would need to be a whole police, logistical and judicial apparatus set up do deal with them. When it takes 36-48 hours to write a desk appearance ticket (a ticket) you can’t tell me that there wasn’t deliberate slowdowns to keep people off the streets until after the President spoke.

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

OK, so this post will be somewhat introspective, but I am here at The Tank, an artist colony which has opened it’s gates to the Counter Convention (not to mention their WiFi). I think Joe Trippi was outside smoking (I don’t have the face recognizing skills that Herself has). There are famous-for-blogging “celebrities” here, but I don’t really feel like coming up to them and striking up a conversation.
The Gipperporn Video
Ugg. Pictures of kids, workers, and the Gipper walking down the hall, hugging George H.W. Bush. They really scrapped the bottom of the stock footage barrel to get the necessary montage of corn fields, ranch workers, and Lee Greenwood.
“Tear down this wall!” And they did! That must make Reagan a God, or perhaps demi-god. It is as of Reagan was made on the 8th day, and then later on that day, he made the Berlin Wall fall down. This is too ludacris for me to putv into words.
Mitt Romney:
“Kerry raised taxes 98 Times”
“If you trial-kawyers, John Edwards is your man.”
“This nation can’t have a policy of 57 varieties.”
“President Bush is right, blame america first crowd is wrong.”
I forgot he ran the Salt Lake City Olympics, the one that was mired in scandel.
No one here really likes Zell, I don’t know why.

In 1940 Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee.
And there is no better example of someone repealing their �private plans� than this good man. He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the
time.
And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.

So Shut The Fuck Up dissenters, we don’t want to hear from you. This is exactly the same atmosphere that the Republicans fostered around the run up to the Iraq War and the 2002 elections. Just because we disagree doesn’t mean we don’t love our country.

John Kerry wants to re-fight yesterday�s war. George Bush believes we have to fight today�s war and be ready for tomorrow�s challenges. George Bush is committed to providing the kind of forces it takes to root out terrorists.

This makes no sense at all. It is George Bush is fighting the last war – the war of Nation-State sponsored terrorism. Just like corporations, terrorism has gone transnational. al Qaeda is beholden to no state, in Afghanistan al Qaeda (though the Taliban) sponsored the state, not the other way around. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Axis of Evil rhetoric against Iran, North Korea, and Syria, and the continued support of an anti-ballistic missile shield are the result of this thinking. The Bush Administration’s actions, as a whole, are predicated on this paradigm that states are the primary sponsors of terrorism. They claim that September 11 changed everything, in some ways they are right: terrorism can, and is, a low cost, low infrastructure event that can (and does) exist outside the realm and power of nation-states. Unfortunately for all Americans, the Bush Administration does not adhere to their own rhetoric; they are still playing by the old rules.
Vice President Cheney
If the inemnity that the the local crowd showed to Miller, the level was ratcheted up when Cheney entered in. When the convention crowd started chanting “Four more years,” our room started chanting “Four More Months.”
Home ownership is about the best indicator of the health of the economy as how many times I drink water a day.
When the PBS camera accidently cut to a protester, the screen went blank. Luckily the crack security system of New York and the Secret Service prevailed.
Cheney delivered the same flat, vitriol filled speech that he has been making for the last few weeks, complete with misstatements and distortions (can we say lie yet?) about Senator Kerry.
Final Thoughts
Cheney’s speech tries to reclassify the “War on Terror” as a battle of wills, a matter of not backing down. Much like a judo move, the Democratic charge that the Bush Administration is too stubborn is being recast instead as resolve and moral seriousness. The first wave of criticism, the “flip-flop” has laid the ground for moving the debate from being about whether or not the policies of the Administration itself is valid, but that the President has made a decision and is willing to see it to the end. It is brilliant – instead of talking about actual policy, they are talking about heuristics – signs that take the place of actual ideas.
Great Quotes of the Night
VP CHeney: “I now have an opponent of my own.”
Local Partisan: “Yeah, Death!”

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

Thousands took to the street to form an uninterrupted line from Broadway and Wall Street to 31st street and then to the Garden. More information from the People For the American Way.

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

New York Region > Just Keep It Peaceful, Protesters; New York Is Offering Discounts” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/18/nyregion/18buttons.html?ex=1250481600&en=fab5ec7c870bb73a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland”>Bloomberg offers coupons to peaceful protesters. What the hell is he thinking? I have visions of, “Let them eat cake have free coupons!” I am pretty sure that the crowds who are coming to NYC to protest have no desire to go to Olive Garden or fucking Applebees. How insulting! On one side you have a large group proclaiming the need for change, and on the other freaking coupons! COUPONS! On the other hand, the Whitney does have a good show going on now.

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

NOTE: This is an article I am fleshing out, and I posted some of it to Metafilter about Frank O. Gehry, and style.
I really think that the problem with Frank Gehry, is that he is trapped in his fame. Once he completed the Guggenheim Bilbao, and everyone went nuts over it, that is all he has been allowed to do. Client’s love that stuff: it is flashy without being terribly earth shattering, his designs make for fairly pretty pictures, and for awhile institutions who had “graduated” to the next just had to have a Gehry building. So, there are literally hundreds of Bilbao’s around the world, with different programs (internal space requirements), different locations, different users, all built at a different point in time.
It is if Corbusier’s Modernism (big M, the 1930’s German version of Modernism) was taken out of storage, given a new coat of paint, and unleashed on the world. Le Corbusier (not to mention Mies van der Rohe) were champions of a modernism that was beyond time and place, and which extolled the virtue of modern technology. Gehry is almost a photo negative of this idea; Gehry’s buildings have no contextual frame – both in time and space, do not take into account human occupation, and (when we get down to it) are merely surface creatures. Program spaces are manipulated and then wallpaper, in many cases (expensive) titanium and stainless steel, are applied to that exteriority.
Corbusier’s fetishism of the luxury ocean liner, the train, concrete grain elevators has been interchanged with Gehry’s reliance on CATIA software (3d positioning software), computer modeling, and stainless steel. Both Corbusier and Gehry reacted to technological progress; Corbusier responded to the horrors of mechanized warfare of World War I and Gehry responded to the acceleration of the computer in design. Corbusier’s city for a million people and Plan for Paris could be built anywhere; and that was the point. Many of Corbusier’s designs employed devices, such as pilotis (short columns) and large squares in which the buildings were placed, in an attempt to bring order to the unordered. The building, as an object, in a perfect field. Gehry places the building, as an object, but in an imperfect field. Yet, bracket Gehry’s buildings, and any single building could have been built anywhere else.
The tabla rasa has come full circle, yet tweaked by Post Modern sensibilities.
Gehry and Corbusier diverge, of course, on many counts. Where Corbusier seemed to grow from a restrictive geometry and ordering system to a more playful modernism, Gehry creates no organizational system for his blobies to operate in. There is no “normal” for the “abnormal” blobs of his to juxtapose. Gehry places his buildings in the heterogeneous landscape because he knows he can no longer control the land.
For example, Corbusier’s Villa Savoy operates in a very ordered geometry and organization, with a few objects breaking free of the organizational field. Gehry creates no such rigorous interplay between the rigid and flexible; it is literally all play. Which might sound great, but think of the suburban sprawl, where every house tries to project its own identity, and you get a Geography of Nowhere. Gehry does operate on a type of internal organization, developed from the program brief, yet this internal organization is suspended when the outer wallpaper is suspended over the spaces.
Gehry freely admits manipulating program spaces for aesthetic value – which is fine – but should not be the base of a design-wide organization scheme. There is something glorious in the formal manipulations by Gehry, but the intellectual underpinnings of his work I believe to be weak, especially his one-size-fits-all mentality. He is the great McMuseum builder of our time.