As AMERICAblog pointed out today, Donald Trump's knives-out anti-immigration attack ad against Jeb! is nothing short of a reboot of the infamous Willie Horton ad which Jeb!'s daddy used to blow Michael Dukakis out of way in 1988.
Donald Trump goes Willie Horton on Jeb Bush
8/31/15 1:24pm by Jon Green
With a 21st Century take on one of the most iconic moments of racism in political advertising, Donald Trump hit Jeb Bush today with a video, posted to Instagram, juxtaposing Bush’s “act of love” comments on immigration with pictures of immigrants who have committed crimes...
It's a hateful piece of fascist race-baiting, but it's also a work of minor evil genius. Because in case you haven't been paying attention to American politics for the last 30 years, from Poppy Bush slinging Lee Atwater slime with both hands while wrapped in an American flag --
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In 1988, one of the central attacks revolved around the Pledge of Allegiance. Mr. Dukakis, as governor, had vetoed state legislation in 1977 that required teachers to lead their students in the pledge. He did so on the basis of an advisory opinion from the state court, which said the legislation was unconstitutional.
Mr. Dukakis, a Harvard lawyer surrounded by other Harvard lawyers, believed himself on very firm ground. But by August 1988, his Republican opponent, Vice President George H.W. Bush, was rousing huge crowds with a contemptuous question: “What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?”
Mr. Dukakis, Mr. Bush said, was “out in deep left field on these issues.” He was also “a card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U.,” more concerned with giving furloughs to criminals — like Willie Horton — than upholding national values, the vice president asserted.
“I simply can’t understand the kind of thinking that lets first-degree murderers out of jail on a furlough and won’t deal with the Pledge of Allegiance,” Mr. Bush said.
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-- to his halfwit, dry-drink son unleashing the full ratfucking fury of Atwater's protege, Karl Rove, on John McCain in 2000 --
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McCain’s closest aides were so stunned by the angle of the attack that at first they tried to shield him from it. “We expected one thing, and it was quite the opposite,” said Fletcher, who personally saw the “Negro child” flyers “all over every car” at the debate. “We figured they would go after him on some sort of philandering issue. McCain had pretty well knocked all that down [by admitting in his 1999 autobiography that, at some point after his five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison, he’d been unfaithful to his first wife], but I always figured that would sort of be the underground thing there. But, man, the child thing.… I’ve seen the worst form of racist sons of bitches in the world in David Duke, but this was unbelievable.”
Almost daily, the ugly buzz grew. Another prominent rumor was that Cindy was a drug addict. In 1994 she’d admitted that she had a prescription-painkiller problem and blamed it on two spinal surgeries and the stress of her husband’s role in the Keating Five scandal. (He was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a disgraced financier.)
There were other whispers as well: McCain had slept with prostitutes and given his wife V.D.; he’d turned traitor in the “Hanoi Hilton,” or was mentally unstable from his captivity, or was a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed to destroy the G.O.P. (There was then, and still is, a wacky Web site devoted to those last theories. The former Green Beret behind it, Ted Sampley, is back at it today with a savage “Stop Hanoi John Kerry” diatribe; he also supports the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Beyond Sampley, most anti-McCain vets in South Carolina opposed the senator on political and/or veterans’ issues—not for his war service. A top McCain aide told me he didn’t think the vets’ antagonism was nearly the factor that the more personal attacks were.) For just meeting with the gay Log Cabin Republicans, McCain was labeled the “Fag Army” candidate.
...
-- The Bush Crime family has always been more than willing to spelunk as deep as necessary into any available political sewer in order to win an election.
And for the most part, the Beltway media has been willing to let the Bushes job out their political wetwork to the scum of the Earth, dab the blood and viscera daintily from the corners of their mouths once the slaughter is done, and then go right back to pretending they're a tribe of genteel, well-mannered aristocrats without too many questions being asked. As the late Doctor Thompson wrote back in 2000:
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There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would Never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. ... Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory.
They were strong words and people said he was Bluffing. But I knew better. Of course Bush would win Florida. Losing was out of the question. Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV.
The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's. ... Everything since then has been political flotsam & Gibberish.
The whole Presidential election, in fact, was rigged and fixed from the start. It was a gigantic Media Event, scripted & staged for TV. It happens every four years, at an ever-increasing cost & 90 percent of the money always goes for TV commercials...
Over and over again Trump has whipped his opponents at their own game by simply lifting pages straight out of Roger Ailes' Olde and Forgotten Bewitchments and Charmes and the Bush Family Grimoire and running the dark magic spells and incantations of the Conservative elite right back at them with twice the throw-weight.
As I said, the Trump campaign's latest ad is worst kind of hateporn for brownshirts. That said, if there are any Democratic campaign advisers out there who are not cribbing notes from the Trump campaign on the general subject of how to use the Right's own hexing powers against them, those advisers should be fired immediately.
One of the Ghana ThinkTank signs on the streets of New York. (all photos courtesy Ghana Think Tank)
A new set of “Black Lives Matter” street signs carrying some provocative messages will appear in New York City in October. Created by public art project Ghana ThinkTank, the notices will pop up on actual sign posts as part of this year’s Art in Odd Places (AiOP), which takes place in Alphabet City. Adopting the same stark look as actual street signs, they feature authoritative lines such as “WHITE GUILT IS COMPLACENCY,” “YOUR PRIVILEGE DOESN’T NEED CONSENT,” and “WARNING: When being racist please be sure to use the appropriate language.” Some are accompanied by graphics of surveillance cameras and upheld hands so that the orders are emphasized by codes that allude to stern policing systems.
“They are holding people accountable for the many different ways we are a part of the racist systems in our country and asking people to consider what roles we can play in the Black Lives Matter movement, whatever our background or race,” Ghana ThinkTank co-founder Christopher Robbins told Hyperallergic through email.
Another sign (click to enlarge)
The language of the signs, as fellow artist Carmen Montoya explained, emerged from street conversations in which individuals were asked what they themselves fail to notice in the discourse around systematic abuses of power.
The Black Lives Matter series, which initially appeared in May during the New Museum’s Ideas Festival, is just one example of a number of signs Ghana ThinkTank has made. It has also established “Legal Waiting Zones” in Queens four years ago to address police harassment of immigrants; for last year’s Art in Odd Places, the group brought “Street Sign Actions” to Manhattan’s Union Square, which announced a number of unofficial rules declaring individual rights.
These projects harness the wide visibility of street signs and their publicly understood roles as official forms of regulation. Ghana ThinkTank’s latest iteration of guerrilla signs focuses particularly on the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Although displayed in public and meant for all to abide by, the rules on actual street signs are not actually evenly applied to all, at times particularly on the basis of an individual’s physical appearance, Robbins said. The Black Lives Matter series highlights this unequal implementation of the language of regulation while also asking viewers to “consider the ways they may be complicit” in such discrimination.
“A street sign signifies the official voice of the system around you,” Robbins said. “By colliding that symbol with language that states things we may not like to admit to/about ourselves, we hope to point out the differences between official truths and actual, and between personal and systemic.”
A warning sign for racist language.
The signs, like those from last year’s AiOP festival, will blend in nearly seamlessly with their surroundings, sharing real estate with official road signs. They may be easy to glance over, but the camouflaged method of display reflects any disregard people may have of the law’s disparate treatment towards different communities.
“Our own action and inaction is part of the cumulative process that helps extend these unfair systems,” Robbins said, “and I hope the ‘officialness’ of the signs points to that often overlooked connection.” Installed for an indefinite and undetermined amount of time, a new road sign eventually blends into the everyday landscape; other messages should not as easily be forgotten.
“One thing that I think is very important about the signs is the private conversations that they provoke,” Montoya said. “This invisible groundswell of ideas is the stuff of change.”
Pablo López Luz, “Cancun I” (2013), Quintana Roo (all photos courtesy the artist and Toluca Éditions)
In his monograph Pyramid, published by Toluca Éditions, photographer Pablo López Luz explores the pre-Columbian influence on modernist architecture in Mexico.
Cover of ‘Pyramid’ by Pablo López Luz
“It is difficult to draw a precise conclusion about the meaning of these shapes in contemporary Mexican architecture, particularly when citing the concept of identity,” Luz told Hyperallergic. “Mexico is a country haunted by its hybrid circumstance, so, finding these references to antique shapes or pre-Columbian motives scattered around different cities makes you wonder if that historical past still finds a place in contemporary identity, or if it surfaces only as a decorative motif. I choose to believe that it does play a role in today’s identity.”
The Mexico City-born artist previously explored unexpected collisions of influence in the built environment through his Terrazoseries. Through aerial photographs, he examined the edges of the sprawling city, with its dense concrete slums, and surprising natural landscapes. Pyramid includes 65 images that highlight the details rather than the density of Mexico City, with the creative book design by the Paris-based Toluca Éditions featuringsmall colorful booklets in Spanish and English that precede two photography sections:“Grids” and “Pyramids.”
‘Pyramid’ by Pablo López Luz (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
‘Pyramid’ by Pablo López Luz (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
‘Pyramid’ by Pablo López Luz (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
Mexican historian, critic, and curator Alonso Morales states in his introduction that this mid-20th century design “announced Mexico’s transformation into a modern country” and “employed among its resources the reinterpretation/updating of pre-Hispanic architecture.”
“Grids” covers the geometric patterns found in neighborhoods formerly on the edge of Mexico City and that resemble those on pre-Columbian ruins, while Pyramids focuses on the step shapes reminiscent of Mesoamerican structures. A smaller insert in the book concentrates on even subtlersuggestions of this history, like a bright green triangle painted on the sidewalk, or a pyramid shape emerging from a brick wall.
“I was looking for visual references to pre-Columbian shapes, be it in the shape of pyramids, staircases, or geometric patterns referencing the primary patterns of this architecture, and I was also searching for direct re-interpretations of sculptural idols —serpents, deities — or specific architectural motives,” Luz explained.
Now many of these midcentury buildings are crumbling like the pre-Columbian sites they reinterpreted, the modern ruins another layer to the narrative of identity in Mexican architecture.
Pablo López Luz, “Picacho II,” Mexico City
Pablo López Luz, “Teatro Independencia I” (2012), Mexico City
Pablo López Luz, “Bosque de las Lomas I” (2011), Mexico City
Pablo López Luz, “Camino a Teotihuacan” (2013), Mexico
Pablo López Luz, “Espacio Escultórico I” (2012), Mexico
I’m just gonna reblog this again because it’s one of my favorite pictures ever.
That girl in the chair seems like such a badass I bet she was the leader of the crew.
I want to write about these girls.
When I was a teenager my mother found my grandmother’s (her mother) school scrapbook. It included things like photos, notes, and a two page spread of every demerit she ever received over the course of her formal education. Each of them set aside with little tags like she was so fucking proud of them. They were all for things like, “Unladylike behavior” or, “Skirt too short” or, “refuses to listen to authority”. I loved that spread so much.
a) perfect example of people discrediting clever idea & intelligence of a female due to her appearance, and
b) all these people wouldn’t have noticed her kit, which was her goal in the first place
Lol “she also wears sexy clothing to distract people from the bulky shoes”
She’s a genius, really
So I got to thinking- if I had to do penetration testing on a corporate facility, how would I do it? Social engineering for one- I’m a natural honeypot. I think there’s a reasonable chance that a guy might invite me back to their office after a few drinks in the neighborhood? :-P But a handbag would be suspicious and leaving cell phones at the gate would be standard practice in any reasonably secure facility. My typical clothing does not leave room to hide anything- but that’s all the more reason they would not be suspicious of me.
And then at the end :
Edit:
Normally I have to sort though about 50% identical replies to my posts on Reddit. For those flexing their fingers and getting ready to give me a hard time:
Yes, they are fake.
Yes, I feature them prominently and deliberately in everything I do.
No, most of my projects do not have all that much technical merit- they are 90% silicone and 10% silicon ;-)
No, if you point out the absolutely obvious no one will think you are insightful, edgy or cool. They will think you are 12.
And that very last part deserves repeating with a call-out :
No, if you point out the absolutely obvious no one will think you are insightful, edgy or cool. They will think you are 12.
I’m not 100% on board with her aesthetic in general, but meh - she doesn’t need me to be so. IT AIN’T FOR ME, IT’S FOR HER.
And in the meantime, DAMN those are some awesome shoes. Go back to her general Imgur page for some of her other projects - I wanna see someone do her Hikaru skirt sometime soon.
The works of prolific writers are often viewed as less-than-literary, like the largely forgotten books of mystery novelist John Creasey, author of 564 books. Even serious novelists like Joyce Carol Oates, author of more than fifty novels, can write so much they lose the critics’ interest. Semi-prolific author Stephen King (fifty-five novels) looks out how we consider highly productive writers, and justifies writing and publishing a lot.
“Heirloom” by Shin Yu Pai in Piper’s Orchard, Carkeek Park, Seattle (photo by Katy Tuttle, all images courtesy the artist)
The apples in Seattle’s Piper’s Orchard will ripen this summer and fall with words from a 26-section poem printed on their skin. The “Heirloom” project by poet Shin Yu Pai is a simple idea — using vinyl stickers to imprint letters on fruit — that invites visitors to have a more complex experience in the Carkeek Park orchard through a constantly changing literary narrative.
“The language written throughout the trees alludes to different aspects of the orchard’s trees and history, and is meant to be experienced as a self-guided tour,” Pai told Hyperallergic. Remotely, the poem and an ambient audio component involving sound from different seasons at the orchard are available online.
Shin Yu Pai placing vinyl letters on an apple (photo by Katy Tuttle)
“Heirloom” and “Keepsake” apples (photo by Katy Tuttle)
“Heirloom” is part of the 12-artist exhibition Propagation: Heaven and Earth VIIin Carkeek Park,co-curated by David Francis and Thendara Kida-Gee. “Just as there are hundreds of varieties of antique and heirloom apples, I wanted to explore uncommon textures of language that could enliven the environment of the orchard,” Pai explained.
The poem takes an abecedarian structure, with a section for each letter of the alphabet. For example “A” is for “Antique,” as in the heritage heirloom apples that grow in the orchard; “E,” for “Eye, apple of my”; “G” for “Graftage,” that is “propagating a vanishing line”; and “M” for “Minna,” for Wilhemina Piper who tended to the orchard. Her husband Andrew’s sweet shop in downtown Seattle burned to the ground in the Great Fire of 1889, which brought the family to relocate to North Seattle where they homesteaded on the land that’s now part of Carkeek Park. Throughout is a love for the wordplay of heirloom apple names that readily lend themselves to the rhythm of Pai’s poem, like Northern spy, wolf river, Spokane beauty, hidden rose, Ozark gold, and pixie crunch.
Shin Yu Pai creating “Heirloom” in Piper’s Orchard (photo by Katy Tuttle)
“Index” apple (photo by Katy Tuttle)
Pai added that the poem was influenced by her two-year-old son Tomo. “Tomo is in the time of acquiring language and words and I thought about children’s literature and structures,” she said. “I didn’t want to write a long piece that was explicitly for children, but there was something about the spirit of a children’s verse form that appealed deeply to me.”
With her living tree collaborators, every experience at the orchard is different, as fruits ripen and are embossed with sunlight-burned letters, as apples fall or rot, and as trees experience infestations or severe weather. Pai has mostly worked with printed poetry, although she’s also an experienced photographer, and her unconventional collaborations include Hedwig Dances performing her poem “Recipe for Paper” at the Chicago Cultural Center in the early 2000s, and her friend and composer Gao Ping creating music from one of her poems. She’s now the poet laureate for Redmond, Washington, and plans to work on outdoor installations in the city’s public trail system involving text.
“I do love written and page-based poems,” she said. “I’m also excited about what happens when readers and viewers encounter text in unexpected environments and how language in public places can make poetry more visible and accessible.”
Shin Yu Pai in Piper’s Orchard (photo by Katy Tuttle)
Fallen apples, including “Keepsake” (photo by Katy Tuttle)
Okay, fine, so we're supposed to pretend to take Donald Trump seriously and continue to indulge this fantasy so narcissistic that Kanye West has called him to take that shit down a notch. Well, then, let's do it. Let's say that Trump actually has proposals worthy of consideration beyond "Are you fucking kidding?" If you go to his website and click on "issues," there is still only one: immigration reform. That's it.
And if you read it, you'll see that Trump fully believes (or doesn't - it's hard to tell what shit he actually believes and what shit is just expediency for the moment) that "solving" the problem of undocumented workers will solve pretty much every other problem in the country, from terrorism to poverty. It's so fuckin' miraculous that no one ever thought before to scapegoat one group and order their purging. It cures all that ails a nation, no?
Beyond actual, seriously-stated proposals like that we should economically sanction and diplomatically isolate Mexico until that nation pays for a 2000 mile border wall, what's most fascinating are the links to articles that make up the "research" that's gone into the plan. No less than half a dozen times, Trump cites the conservative news port-a-potty, Breitbart, which means either he's paying good money in exchange for blow jobs and clicks or he just doesn't give a shit what his sources are.
'Cause, see, for example, Trump offers the kind of proposal makes stupid people smile stupidly because they think it's common sense: "Use the monies saved on expensive refugee programs to help place American children without parents in safer homes and communities, and to improve community safety in high crime neighborhoods in the United States." And he links to two Breitbart articles. For "high crime neighborhoods," he sends us not to crime statistics or even a report of criminality. No, we get to click over to an article that is a summary of a caller to Laura Ingraham's radio ear bleeder. No shit, it's a woman claming to be black and living in Baltimore who says she wants asylum from crime in her neighborhood, which may well be true, except if you're passing it off as news, you motherfucking confirm that it is a real person with a real opinion and not some fucknut who wants to hear their bullshit on the radio. But for a presidential candidate to use that as a demonstration of the effects of high crime rates is laughably absurd, if we still had the capacity to find all this absurd anymore.
On it goes. Another link is to a Breitbart article that is, shit you not, a reprint of an abstract of a study, along with the first paragraph of the introduction. In other words, the article's "writer" didn't even bother to read the fucking study about how immigrant workers affect native workers in the United States. One other frightening thing comes out of looking at Trump's "research." Most of these articles are about the effects of documented and undocumented workers. In other words, it's not just an attack on "illegals." It's an attack on immigrants coming here and taking our jobs or some such fucked-up lie.
This isn't an indictment of Breitbart. If you go to the circus, expect to see heaps of elephant dung. But it is an indictment of Trump, who doesn't give a fuck who his "experts" are. You been on TV saying shit Trump likes? You're hired. Who the fuck cares if you're associated with white supremacists. And it's an indictment of the knuckle-dragging yahoos and racist opportunists who see in Trump their idiot god who says what they really want said.
Sure, sure, we can pretend that these are serious proposals. But if we do, we have to seriously contend with the hatred from which they spring and the hatred that they provoke. We have to seriously understand that a large contingent of the Republican Party is no longer hiding its racist anger. Instead, it's out in the open. We thought that would make it less frightening, if we could see its face and hear its awful words.
The Japanese Phoenix Pavilion, known as the Ho-o-den, from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (photo via Wikipedia)
Last week, a trio of late-19th-century Japanese sliding door paintings, originally believed to be missing or destroyed, finally emerged after years spent hidden in a Chicago Park District storage facility. Decorated with long-tailed phoenixes and painted by artist Hashimoto Gahō, the golden doors first appeared at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which was an important six-month-long international event that attracted 27 million visitors from 46 countries. The rediscovery of these doors warrants revisiting the Japanese building in which they were originally installed: the Ho-o-den — or Phoenix Pavilion — which, though long gone, has a lasting albeit quiet legacy in US architecture, most notably in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s early ideas on his Prairie House concept, as published in a 1901 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. (image via Wikipedia) (click to enlarge)
According to Robert Karr Jr., a director at the Japan America Society of Culture, Wright first encountered Japanese architecture through visits to the Ho-o-den. The architect had moved to Chicago in 1887, just three years before construction of the Ho-o-den began on Wooded Island at the center of the fair. Gifted to the city by the Emperor of Japan, the Pavilion was first designed by Masamichi Kuru in Tokyo, where its parts were also built. It then made the journey via steamer to San Francisco, before traveling by rail to Jackson Park, where Japanese workmen pieced together the three buildings connected by covered walkways.
Wright, working on the Exposition’s Transportation Building, would have been able to observe the Ho-o-den’s construction from its start, as Robert McCarter notes in his account of Wright’s career. Additionally, Okakura Kakuzō, whose writings had “an enormous impact on Wright,” also penned the accompanying illustrated description of the Pavilion. Karr writes that the young architect, just 26 years old, had “a revelation” upon seeing the Ho-o-den that led him to explore new paths:
Soon after encountering the Phoenix Pavilion, Wright would begin experimenting with what he eventually called, “the elimination of the insignificant,” an approach that would lead him to transform American residential design by focusing upon principles inspired by Japan rather than formulas found in the West.
A scaled-down replica of an ancient wooden temple in Uji, near Kyoto, the Phoenix Pavilion adopted a symmetrical, cruciform plan and was actually meant to represent the mythological bird: a two-storied central hall signified the body while the right and left colonnades, the wings; a corridor at the back, accordingly, formed its tail. Wright’s own early Prairie rooms reflected this plan, reducing the established complex, boxy interiors at the turn of the century into expansive and fluid ones. As Kevin Nute describes in his study of the role of Japanese architecture in Wright’s work, the Ho-o-den’s central hall consisted of four main spaces. The configuration, he writes, is one that “appears to have quite logically given rise to its Western equivalent in the early Prairie House plan”:
[T]he jodannoma [private sitting area] became a sitting area directly in front of the hearth, which had replaced the traditionally decorative wall-alcove, the tokonoma; the tsuginoma [where one received guests] becoming a living area; the konnoma a dining room; and the shosai, a study or library.
The William Winslow House, whose construction began the same year of the Ho-o-den’s completion, reflects a similar layout, as does the Ward Willits House, designed in 1901. Many of Wright’s houses, like the Ho-o-den, are essentially symmetrical and build on a cruciform foundation, with some having additional, latched-on porches.
Top: Floor plan of the Ho-o-den (image digitized by National Diet Library, Japan); bottom: floor plan of the Winslow House (image via Wikipedia) (click to enlarge)
How much of a direct influence Japanese architecture actually had on Wright’s work has been widely debated: the architect, who in 1905 travelled extensively throughout Japan and also passionately collected woodblock prints, supposedly rejected any himself; many, however, do consider his viewing of the Ho-o-den as formative to the development of his Prairie style, and the similarities between the Eastern and Western structures are clear and go beyond those in basic configuration. As McCarter writes:
The effect on Wright of the “Ho-o-den” was immediate, and in his work he took as his own and transformed numerous of its aspects, including the cruciform plan; the horizontal proportions; the screen-like walls that slid open and closed under the continuous wrapping door-top beam; the lack of rigid interior room division; the overhanging, shade-giving roof, cantilevered outwards from its inset supports; as well as the tokonoma at the center, where Wright located the fireplace — all aspects of the interior space of the “Ho-o-den.” It is also interesting to note that this hybrid structure, joining as it does the temple and the house, may also have served as an inspiration for Wright’s tendency “to treat the dwelling as a form of temple to traditional family life — based around the ‘altar’ or central communal hearth.”
Room from the Central Hall of the Ho-o-Den, featuring shoji and a view of the found door paintings (photo digitized by National Diet Library, Japan)
The Prairie homes’ embrace of the Ho-o-den’s features is observed through striking similarities like their overhanging eaves, but their translation of the Pavilion’s sliding door paintings — like the recently found trio — are less evident. Wright’s sightings of such paintings, also known as fusuma or shoji, interestingly influenced his design for, not doors, but windows. Writing for the April 2001 issue of Magazine Antiques, stained glass historian and restorer Julie L. Sloan explains:
Details of staircase window from the Isidore Heller House (image via Wikipedia) (click to enlarge)
The shoji of the earlier Fujiwara period, shown in the Ho-o-den, were “elaborately ornamented with paintings of various kinds.” Thus, the decorative quality of these shoji may have been the liberating concept that triggered Wright’s development of the screenlike, purely decorative, rectilinear Prairie window.
The windows in the 1897-constructed Isidore Heller House, for example, broke from the curvilinear patterns Wright previously favored. They were also the first for which Wright incorporated color, possibly inspired by the colorful sliding door paintings in the Ho-o-den, as Sloan surmises. The three fusuma found in the storage facility even attest to this vibrancy: relatively well preserved, they boast iridescent colors, especially on the plumages of the phoenixes.
The three sliding door paintings originally shown at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (courtesy Chicago Park District) (click to enlarge)
Unlike the rest of the buildings constructed for the Exposition that were intentionally destroyed when the fair ended, the Ho-o-den remained until 1946, when it tragically burned in a fire started by two boys. It may be easy to glance over the Wright connection, as today only a Japanese garden (currently evolving) alludes to its site’s former occupant. The emergence of signs of the past like the fusuma are, therefore, necessary, occasional reminders: of a slice of history and, equally significant, of the diversity of works that have left —and continue to leave — lasting impressions on Western art.
The Phoenix Pavilion, or Ho-o-den, at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (photo via Wikipedia)
Implementation of ‘A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style’
Data scientist Kai Sheng Tai has produced public available code to transform images into the style of various painters (as first seen in this paper I covered last Friday here):
This is a Torch7 implementation of the method described in the paper
'A Neural Algorthm of Artistic Style’ by Leon Gatys, Alexander Ecker, and Matthias Bethge.
It’s quicksand. Quicksand is much thicker than water, which is why things sink so slowly. By that same logic, one can walk on its surface if you go fast enough and with little enough pressure, like skipping a stone on water.
THAT IS FANTASTIC
Non-Newtonian fluids, everyone.
As a child I believed that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem in my life than it has turned out to be. Little did I know I could defeat it by simply waddling like a penguin.
Same here! The 80s gave me unrealistic expectations on how much quicksand I would encounter in my life.
once i was babysitting my neighbor’s 6 year old and she asked me why i was so ugly and without thinking i said “i’m you from the future” and she cried for like 30 minutes
once upon a midnight dreary as i shuffled, coffee-bleary over to a starbucks, which was open until four while i studied, nearly napping suddenly there came a snapping as of someone gently rapping— rapping about cheaper stores ‘tis some kanye,’ i muttered, ‘rapping about this cheap store- only kanye; nothing more.’
and yet still, his strength unsapping he is rapping! he is rapping! over coffeeshop intercoms from new york to jersey shore; and his beats are so strange-seeming that i think i must be dreaming and i know that he is scheming to deliver raps galore. and i ask him now: “who art thou, shopping thrifty, as if poor?” quoth the rapper - ‘Macklemore!’
I feel like this is a great example of racism in the media. Both of these are reporting on the same event, but TMZ portrays Nicki as the “angry black woman”. First the choose the picture that makes Nicki look like she’s attacking, while Buzzfeed used a picture taken seconds before but portrays Nicki as much less aggressive. Then TMZ goes on to use buzzwords like “explodes” and then includes “You Bitch” in the headline, all to make Miley seem like the victim and to demonize Nicki. It’s the little things like this that change the story and leaves Nicki as the villain and lets Miley escape scandal unscathed. The same thing happened with Nicki and Taylor’s made-up “feud”.
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