==pla|\|ing lakes==

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Some examples of Andy Goldsworthy's collaborations with nature to produce beautiful transient art [via Heaneyland]

11:48 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

The San Francisco gallery owner that exhibited a painting based on the Abu Ghraib atrocities has been attacked repeatedly and forced to close her gallery


8:23 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

In case you still confuse Robert Redford's charmingly naive yet tenacious performance as Bob Woodward with the real article

Robert Upshur Woodward, grew up the son of a Republican judge in Illinois, and later attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. While there he joined Phi Gamma Delta and one of the "top" second tier secret societies, Book and Snake.

Three days after leaving Yale, he entered the Navy and was assigned to the recently recommissioned U.S.S. Wright, a National Emergency Command Post Afloat (NECPA). In his book, "Secret Agenda," Hougan quotes Rear Admiral Francis J. Fitzpatrick who said the Wright was designed to "stand in readiness to embark the President and take him to sanctuary at sea in the event of national emergency." But according to a "highly placed U.S. government official" who spoke to Havill, the ship was an "at sea Pentagon."

In "Deep Truth," Havill writes that Woodward’s clearance was "top secret 'crypto'" giving him "access to nearly any classified document as well as codes. He also ran the ship’s newspaper, which gave him an excuse to speak to anyone aboard." After leaving the Wright, he boarded the U.S.S. Fox, which was based along the California coast and also outfitted for communications intelligence. The Fox got as close as twenty miles from the Vietnamese coast. After his four-year obligation in the Navy, he stayed on one more year.

He was assigned to the Chief of Naval Operations where, Hougan writes, his duties at the Pentagon included presiding over "top-secret communiqués from the White House, the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the NSC ... That is, during his year at the Pentagon, he was one of a handful of officers chosen by the Navy to brief the government’s most important intelligence officials on events and operations around the world."

He's Navy intel, folks. Always has been, always will be.

3:54 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Seattle's new Rem Koolhaas-designed library sounds very cool -- and for once everyone in this usually divided city loves it

To its fans, the new library is everything Seattle has never been. It is bold instead of trite, unabashedly modern instead of apologetically primitive. It marries outlandish form with visionary function. More important, it could become the public commons the city has always needed but had never found the moxie to create.

Mr. Koolhaas's creation, a shell of angled girder and glass, pushes every aesthetic envelope without offending. What makes it all work - why 500 people a day have been getting first-time library cards - is the raw power of so much function inside of the form.

The 11-story cathedral is 100,000 square feet larger than the old library. Because of this, the public has access to 75 percent of the library's collection, up from 33 percent before. The building is filled with Wi-Fi hot spots for people to connect their laptops to the Internet. Acoustic sound domes allow you to play music - yours or the library's - as loud as you like. Microchips embedded in each library item allow computers reading radio frequencies to sort and transport books, freeing the library staff to work with customers.

Cheers Seattle. Nice work.

3:39 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Painting is um back

Didn't know it got lost, did you?

Actually, though it seems long ago now, I remember when painting seemed hopelessly out of date.

Now I'm just happy to see artists persevering, regardless of the form.

And maybe I'll throw my hand in, when I can afford supplies...

3:11 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

The Pirate Act would make taxpayers pay to prosecute file sharers for MusicMobsters

EFF complaint form here.

3:07 PM - [Link] - Comments ()