The Equitable Building, a 12-story office tower for the insurance company of the same name, always caught my eye when I lived and worked in Portland in the early 1970s. Its gleaming green glass and aluminum cladding was far more “modern” than any building in town. I didnt realize it had been conceived more than thirty years before. Looking at pictures taken after its completion in 47, the cars appear More …
Im not a big fan of Jerry Jones, the hovering owner of the Dallas Cowboys who thinks hes as qualified to be on the field coaching as his coaches. But I found a recent quote by him somewhat insightful. “Football is full of the unexpected and the spontaneous-it can make two strangers into friends. Art has the power to do that too, to get people talking, and looking, and interacting.” More …
From 1967 to 1977, a clutch of hardened former student protesters, led by an earnest journalist (Ulrike Meinhof), a charismatic thug (Andreas Baader) and a blonde ministers daughter (Gudrun Ensslin) held Germany hostage with bombings and assassinations. In faux-military bombast, they called themselves the Red Army Faction (RAF). Everyone else called them the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Baader-Meinhof and company never ruled anything but a kernel of ardent supporters, but they learned More …
A long wait at the DMV, while my 17-year-old son took his driving test, was interrupted by a tweet on my Blackberry. It was Tyler Green sending a link to Blake Gopniks recent Washington Post article about Gopniks visit to Lightning Field (above). Gopnik wrote that the setting of Lightning Field, near Quemado, New Mexico, is “a classic patch of sagebrush-covered land, set on an empty plateau 7,200 feet high. More …
“No Discipline” is a journey through Ron Arads designs, from battle-worn chairs and sound systems to his steel-ribboned and forthcoming Design Museum Holon in Israel, his birthplace. True to form, Arad is confounding his visitors at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition is organized around his Cage Sans Frontieres (Cage Without Boundaries), a figure-8 of glass, steel and gauze that showcases his objects on multiple levels. More …
Robert Stones new documentary, Earth Days, opens this week, as opponents of global warming seem to have found a new “scientific” truth to attack: the birth of Barack Obama in the United States. The closing film of this years Sundance Film Festival, Stones inquiry takes us back to the first Earth Day, in 1970 – yes, the title is a pun that few in Stones potential audience will get at More …
The Cove by Louie Psihoyos of Boulder Colorado stands out as an exemplary personal journey tale in what is now a longstanding genre of independent filmmaking. Ric OBarry was a trainer of dolphins, who brought us Flipper, the TV series of the 1960s. Two Flippers were required to play out the show, which also spawned a dolphin performance industry that still demands a huge number of the marine mammals. How More …
Summer is classical music festival season in Colorado. No matter the destination one is sure to find some of the finest musicians and vocalists performing in gorgeous alpine and bucolic settings. Even as Aspen Music Festival was rumored in July to have sustained a recession-induced cut of personnel and some music students, the atmosphere of summer music festivals throughout Colorado is like a vacation for the musicians that also builds More …
When I walked in to David Floria Gallery the morning I left Aspen I had the sense I knew everything about Herbert Bayer, even though I actually knew very little. The creator of an all-lower-case typeface he used in Bauhaus publications called universal, Bayers life followed a trajectory from Bauhaus graphic designer to New York emigre to Aspen artist who worked in lithography, painting and sculpture – much of the More …
At a screening of the Hurt Locker that I paid to attend on the west side of Manhattan, where people tend to deal with war only if the New York Times says its OK, the 1 pm showing was full. This is one feature about the war in Iraq that may actually get an audience. Kathryn Bigelow presents war as constant sequel to itself. The Hurt Lockers about a bomb More …
It must have been poetic justice that Conrad and I sat in the very back of the bus. It made a good vantage from which to photograph the first roadcut that angled upward from Frijoles Canyon to the New Mexico Ranch School, which the government annexed in 1942 for the Manhattan Project. (The Ranch School educated Gore Vidal, William S. Burroughs, as well as other notables who had been sickly More …
When you are in rainy New York this summer, one of the exhibitions to see is “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward.” At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, through August 23. (Taliesen West, Scottsdale, 1937-59.) Back in the 1930s, when the young Museum of Modern Art had already declared itself the arbiter of all things modern, architecture curator Philip Johnson made a statement about Frank Lloyd Wright that he lived More …