Poetic pragmatism, neo-transcendentalism, bikes, burritos, basketball.
When the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was published in late 60s and early 70s, the idea was to create a finely curated list of everything “useful, relevant to independent education, high quality or low cost, not already common knowledge, and easily available by mail.” The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, Fall 1968. From Arts & Ecology. [...]
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Last night, Mara and I were messing around with Google Maps, checking out giant Japanese buddhas from the air. [Check out this one in Kamakura, near Tokyo]. Then we decided to see what North Korea looked like, and we raced over the Pyongyang and suddenly found this crazy thing with a giant triangular shadow. What the? [...]
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This is an incredible mosaic in the bathroom of the New Museum of Contemporary art in New York. It is also EASILY the most impressive thing in the whole museum. New York was filled with good times, as usual, but a couple of the things that totally blew my mind (and that are link-friendly) were [...]
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This is a photo by Thomas Allen. I first noticed his stuff when I saw the covers of Vintage reissues of James Ellroy’s novels (like this one for Suicide Hill). The photo above is from a series of dioramas that Allen created from cut-outs of 50’s pulp novels. I love the use of the book-ends [...]
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This weekend I got an incredible book about San Francisco called San Francisco in Maps & Views. I usually avoid glossy coffee-table historical books because they’re so often filled with disappointments — bad color, bad printing, messy layout, uninspired writing, PLUS they’re really expensive. But THIS ONE. This one is different. The maps are very well-reproduced, high-res [...]
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Last night, I saw architect Teddy Cruz deliver a fast-paced, idea-rich presentation at the San Francisco Art Institute. In a little over an hour, he tore through a slide show covering his recent work on the social, cultural, political, and economic forces at work in communities along the US-Mexico border. The slide show itself was [...]
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My nomination for All-Time Best Moment In An Art Documentary has to be the “Bullshit!” scene in Concert Of Wills: Making The Getty Center. Abstract-artist-turned-landscape-designer Robert Irwin literally calls bullshit on architect Richard Meier during an important Getty Center planning session. [The object of their disagreement is Irwin’s garden design, pictured at right. Thx, brewbooks.] [...]
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Last summer, NPR did a series on one of my favorite architectural elements — the front porch. An installment from late July covered the use of the porch in contemporary home-building, specifically in New Urbanist (wikipedia entry) developments, such as Seaside, Florida and other pseudo-quaint “towns”. (More on my problems with New Urbanism another time). The most [...]
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A few months ago, the NYT Sunday magazine ran a profile of architect Daniel Libeskind and his Tribeca loft. (Incidentally, check out that link to his website; there’s some pretty hot flouting of web conventions. For example, when you mouse over a link, almost everything on the screen disappears, except a few stray words and [...]
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My name is Doug LeMoine. I work both on, and for, the Internet. You can find more about me in the About Me page that I wrote about me.
