Bibliostructures: Ballard and Calder
Like A Living Thing
Source Code: Architecture
Source Code: Music

Category: Music

Grinderman is the First Great Band of the Anthropocene Epoch

First published on the Huffington Post on 08/17/2010 Grinderman is the first great band of the Anthropocene Epoch. Their music is wild, primal, charming and funky and their lyrics are witty and clear-eyed observations of where we stand as a civilization at this moment in geologic time. “All of a sudden it seems impossible to…

Alexandra Lange and Rosanne Cash, heirs to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton

first published on the Huffington Post on September 9, 2010 In February, Alexandra Lange created a storm with an essay on Design Observer suggesting that the New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, is not good enough: Ouroussoff has an opinion about design, but his reviews offer not much more than that, opinion. His approach —…

The Return of the Laughing Clowns

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds invited the Laughing Clowns to reform to appear at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival they curated staged in Sydney on Cockatoo Island in January, 2009. It had been about twenty five years since their last performance. They were sublime. “I loved that band,” Nick said. All Tomorrow’s Parties looped back to…

“Artists are the real saints. You can never know enough about Duke Ellington.” GLENN O’BRIEN

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SOURCE CODE: A positive aspect of the closing of the @powerhousemuseum in Sydney’s CBD & moving it to Parramatta (rather than using its incredibly vast collection to seed another museum) is that its store is discounting merchandise …a usefully roomy tote bag with its current address (a potential memento mori) & @annejwatson ’s BUILDING A MASTERPIECE, first published in 2006 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the design competition for the @sydneyoperahouse won by Jorn Utzon, & updated in 2013 to acknowledge the work of the Australian architects Peter Hall, Lionel Todd and David Littlemore, who completed the building after Utzon’s departure in 1966. - This revised edition is the starting point for anyone chronicling today’s cultural impact of the Sydney Opera House as a living thing. It has a foreword by Jorn Utzon, expanding upon his acceptance of the building as a hybrid work and his magnanimous comments about his successors, made in the design principles published in 2002, & is the first significant examination of Peter Hall’s design contributions & a nuanced examination of the building coming to life, beyond the drama and acrimony surrounding Utzon’s departure that had such a negative effect on Hall’s subsequent work and life. This was the subject of her next book THE POISONED CHALICE, the first examination of Hall’s papers and diaries that are now held in the @statelibrarynsw . - In an era of fake news & unreliable references unearthed from internet searches Anne Watson’s Sydney Opera House books are doubly dependable, guided by a museum curator’s expansive overview & the rigorous footnoting and verifying of a university thesis (which was the genesis of POISONED CHALICE), that anchor significant contemporary appraisals of the Sydney Opera House: the two books by Peter Hall’s architect colleagues Ken Woolley and Peter Webber and @henpitt ’s THE HOUSE, which adds original contemporary reporting to an examination of archival media reports of the genesis of the Opera House. - These books also allow us to incorporate tangential sources, i.e., this exhibition of the impact of Marion Hall Best’s store, designed by Peter Hall, staged at @sydlivmus .

HYBRID VIGOUR. The @sydneyoperahouse has illustrated its creation story on a wall on the lower concourse curving around the box office for guided tours and a small souvenir stall. It begins with Jorn Utzon’s poetic and abstract sketches inspired by ancient structures from around the world where timeless myths are ritually re-enacted, moves through a detailed examination of the design and construction and ends in 1973, when the building opened, with a small uncaptioned photograph of Peter Hall, Lionel Todd and David Littlemore, the Australian architects who completed the Opera House. - The curve continues into a void with stairs connecting this concourse, that Peter Hall configured a decade after the Opera House opened, with Utzon’s upper concourse and forecourt. As the current renewal project draws to a close with a substantial upgrading of the equipment and backstage areas of the Concert Hall, whose interiors Peter Hall designed, the next phase of the creation story, one that connects Utzon’s and Hall’s work is being written on the building. The lower concourse video wall now shows a mesmerising info-video by Sam Doust that honours Hall’s contributions, and on the upper concourse are photos of Utzon and Hall. - Hall’s contributions are only partly in his designs. By infusing them with the ‘spirit of the times’ of the 1960s and 1970s he set in motion the ‘intangible value’ of the Opera House that the conservation management guide of 2017 describes as: “…the ability of the place to encourage excellence in the performing arts.” It’s apt then that the last performances in the Concert Hall before the renovations will be next January by Solange, whose shows are tailored for and uniquely connected to significant architecture and design works, including the Sydney Opera House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, Donald Judd’s structures in Marfa, Texas and the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg by Herzog and de Meuron. - #midcenturymodern #JornUtzon #modernarchitecture @benmarshall_sydneyoperahouse @saintrecords #architecture #solangeknowles

THE UBIQUITY OF ARNE JACOBSEN: Ant colony in the ground floor reading room of the @cityofsydney public Library in Customs House. Second photo (swipe right) is of the newly returned Egg chairs whose pedestals have been repaired. #midcenturymodern #danishdesign #arnejacobsen #antchair #eggchair

THE UBIQUITY OF ARNE JACOBSEN: seen in Kings Cross, an adoption notice for a 1970s Swan chair. — #midcenturymodern #arnejacobsen #swanchair #gentrification

#givecredit : Apple’s launch of iTunes in 2001 is probably the starting point for the erasure of music credits. Sure, we could now buy digital tracks rather than download them for free but musicians have never earned nearly enough for their digital sales or streams, and the context was shorn from recordings as musicians, producers, etc were only sporadically identified. Some recordings offered “digital booklets” with full album sales but clicking open a file of digital artwork doesn’t translate, experientially, to picking up and glancing at a CD booklet or album cover while listening to music. .. — This erasure has been accelerated with the launch of Apple’s Catalina operating system which splits the purchase of music, television shows, movies and podcasts into separate apps. The music app now opens onto suggestions to entice you into subscribing to its streaming service. .. — I’m a fan of digital libraries. I move a lot and travel a lot. I want to hold my whole music (and movie & t.v. ) libraries in my iPhone XS max. But I’m increasingly aware of how much I lose with each upgrade. A glitch occurred when I changed service providers for my phone around the same time I upgraded my computers to Catalina. The artwork for albums was misaligned on my phone. Maybe the iMusic algorithm is trying to make the same kind of connections as I do … as in the photo above: Aligning @wilco and Bob Dylan isn’t completely off the mark. And a weird inspiration spiral is illustrated: Bob Dylan’s 40s and 50s song covers are inspired by Willie Nelson’s own versions of these songs, and then Annie Lennox’s standards album includes Willie’s “Crazy”. My two most profoundly direct musical inspirations - @wayne.shorter ‘s Weather Report and @edkuepper ‘s Laughing Clowns - are juxtaposed putting Judi Keupper’s artwork for Ed’s band the Aints with Weather Report. It’s a temporal loop: Wayne Shorter helped introduce rock n roll into jazz and Ed helped re-introduce jazz into rock n roll. .. — Which is a convoluted way of explaining how much I admire and rely upon @jaxstamusic ’s ever deepening database of extensive and complete music credits.. - #creditwherecreditisdue #music #jazz #itunes

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE: This vintage postcard is probably from around 1966, the year that Jorn Utzon left the Sydney Opera House project and Australian architects Peter Hall, David Littlemore and Lionel Todd were appointed to complete it. The building on the left is Qantas House, finished by David Littlemore’s firm in 1957. On the right is the Wentworth Hotel, by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, completed in 1966. . — Today is the Sydney Opera House’s 46th birthday. Being an inauspicious anniversary year, not divisible by 5, not ending in 0, the celebrations are low key, with a launch of the Inside and Outside gins by @archierosesyd in the newly opened event space on the northern broadwalk that’s advertised furnished with tables with Arne Jacobsen’s series 7 chairs pulled up to them. . — The Outside gin is salty, harsher, with a maritime sensibility. The Inside gin is wildly flavourful, drawing inspiration from the bright colours of the furnishings specified by Peter Hall and the richly varied performances within the venues. But the Inside Gin is also something momentous, the first significant piece of merchandise that specifically celebrates Peter Hall’s design contributions and the life of the building. — I took a tour of Archie Rose’s distillery in Rosebery on their open day a couple of weeks ago. Their distilling machinery is a mix of heritage equipment built by craftspeople in Tasmania and contemporary engineering innovations of their own, which reminded me of the cooling system of orange and green pipes spiralling around the basement and ground floor levels of the Opera House, devised by @steensenvarming . — Around the time of the Opera House’s 40th anniversary the Wentworth Hotel renovated its ground floor cocktail lounge, turning it into something of a petting zoo for mid-century modern furniture. A yolk-yellow egg chair was in a prominent place. It was the beginning of me noticing the increasing ubiquity of Arne Jacobsen’s furniture. It had a rickety base and is now gone, but there are still many Warren Platner chairs, and a high tea with canapés and cocktails made with Archie Rose’s gins. . @sydneyoperahouse #midcenturymodern #arnejacobsen #gin

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