EMMA PEEL: Hampstead Penthouse

Up until late 1966 Emma lived in a sleek, modern penthouse atop a high-rise in Hampstead, guarded by the “cyclops,” which Steed eyes warily (top).

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of this unique dwelling is that there are no right angles, and the only conventional door is the main entrance, far left; all the rest are sliding doors. The kitchen entrance is to the right of the high-tech entertainment center/bar behind the right-side sofa–on which, you’ll note, are Steed’s bowler and brolly. The living area, enlarged below, features a free-standing fireplace surrounded by a wrap-around sofa, and sliding doors leading to the bathroom, darkroom and storage.

From within the kitchen, if the kitchen door was enlarged, one would see the panorama above, which reveals the area directly behind the fireplace. To the far left in this image is the bedroom door, through which the bed is visible. To the right of the bedroom is access to the balcony, which wraps around the living room.

The compact, modern kitchen with its built-in appliances is shown in the detail view, above left. Seems either Emma just had a party, or she is not particularly diligent about washing her dishes.

Next are two exterior views of the building; note the name visible in the second. The actual location is Highpoint 2 in Highgate. Tony McKay reports that the statues by the entrance are a result of the architect being told that Highpoint 1 was too “modern.”

The architect was Tecton, a distinguished firm of British architects, established by Bernhold Lubetkin. Denys Lasdun was at one time a partner. They designed the Penguin Pool and Gorilla House at London Zoo; two blocks at Highpoint and North Hill flats at Highgate; Finsbury Health Centre; and flats in Roseberry Avenue.

COURTESY RICHARD PLEUGER!

COURTESY ROZ PAYNE!

Jodorowsky’s two most famous films, the original ‘midnight movies’ on DVD, fully uncut and presented in their correct screen ratios, along with an informative book makes this the essential cult movie boxset release.

El Topo is Jodorowsky’s unique spiritual western, which takes on the ritual violence of Sam Peckinpah and the grotesque humour of Sergio Leone to roughly sketch an apology on the oppression and arrogance of power. This film is a journey through tragedy and anarchy, myth and revolution, paganism and holy scripture, classicism and surrealism, artistic performance and cinematic action. El Topo remains an essential, raw work of instinctive, visceral power created by one of the most visionary filmmakers in cinematic history.

The Holy Mountain (aka La Montagna Sacra), Jodorowsky’s tantric masterpiece is presented here on DVD, in undoubtedly the best condition ever on any home video format, thankfully at last losing the cursed ‘fogging’ that ruined the old Japanese home video editions. Cinema for Jodorowsky is none other than great magic, an elaborate alchemical process. The Holy Mountain is probably the film that best represents the idea of art as an inner quest, a journey of initiation but also artifice and boundless illusion. In the cinema, surrealism has perhaps never achieved such expressive, almost explosive, power as in the work of this remarkable filmmaker who knows Holy Scripture like the back of his hand. Poised between erotic delirium and political satire; the cabala and cartoons; catastrophism and salvation; Catholicism and heresy; horror and cinema verite; violence and spirituality; performance and narration, The Holy Mountain is utterly essential for anyone who claims to love cinema.

El Topo Special features:
Academy ratio
Spanish language soundtrack in Dolby Digital 2.0
Optional subtitles in English or Italian
Interview with Jodorowsky expert Massimo Monteleone

The Holy Mountain Special features:
2.35:1 widescreen
English or Italian language soundtracks in Dolby Digital 2.0
Interview with Jodorowsky expert Massimo Monteleone

COURTESY JOHN COULTHART!

A Con Job by Pakistan’s Pal, George Bush
Robert Scheer
March 29, 2005 Los Angeles Times

Trying to follow the U.S. policy on the proliferation of nuclear weapons is like watching a three-card monte game on a city street corner. Except the stakes are higher.

The announcement Friday that the United States is authorizing the sale to Pakistan of F-16 fighter jets capable of delivering nuclear warheads ‚Äî and thereby escalating the region’s nuclear arms race ‚Äî is the latest example of how the most important issue on the planet is being bungled by the Bush administration.

Consider this dizzying series of Bush II-era actions:

We have thrown away thousands of Iraqi and American lives and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars after crying wolf on Iraq’s long-defunct nuclear weapons program and now expect the world to believe similar scary stories about neighboring Iran.

We have cozied up to Pakistan for more than three years as it freely allowed the operation of the most extravagantly irresponsible nuclear arms bazaar the world has ever seen.

We sabotaged negotiations with North Korea by telling allies that Pyongyang had supplied nuclear material to Libya, even though the Bush administration knew that the country of origin of those shipments was our “ally,” Pakistan.

Now, Lockheed Martin has been saved from closing its F-16 production line by the White House decision to lift the arms embargo on Pakistan and allow the sale. The decision, which ends a 1990 embargo put in place by the president’s father in reprisal for Pakistan’s development of a nuclear arsenal, is especially odd at a time when we are berating European nations for considering lifting their arms embargo on China.

The White House says the F-16s are a reward to Islamabad for its help in disrupting terrorism networks, despite a decade of Pakistan’s strong support of Al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Yet Pakistan’s ruling generals could be excused for believing that Washington is not seriously concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. How else to explain invading a country ‚Äî Iraq ‚Äî that didn’t possess nukes, didn’t sell nuclear technology to unstable nations and didn’t maintain an unholy alliance with Al Qaeda ‚Äî and then turning around and giving the plum prizes of U.S. military ingenuity to the country that did?

Even as the Bush administration continues to confront Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program, Islamabad has admitted that Pakistani nuclear weapons trafficker Abdul Qadeer Khan ‚Äî the father of his nation’s nuclear bomb ‚Äî provided Iran with the centrifuges essential to such a program. Further, new evidence reveals that Khan marketed to Iran and Libya not only the materials needed for a nuclear bomb but the engineering competence to actually make one.

Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf insists Khan was running his nuclear smuggling operation under the radar of the military government that brought Musharraf to power. And although this is a highly implausible claim given the reach of the military’s power and the scope of the operation, the White House has found it convenient to buy it hook, line and sinker ‚Äî all the better to remarket Pakistan to the American people as a war-on-terrorism ally.

While Pakistan was receiving such heaping helpings of benefit of the doubt, North Korea became the Bush administration’s scapegoat for the rapid nuclear proliferation happening on its watch, according to the Washington Post. “In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya,” wrote the Post. “But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction.” Sources told the paper that “Pakistan’s role as both the buyer and the seller [of uranium hexafluoride] was concealed to cover up the part played by Washington’s partner.”

One result of the United States shortsightedly pulling this fast one has been the collapse of multilateral nonproliferation talks with Pyongyang. Yet in the long term, the cost is much greater: a dramatic erosion of trust in U.S. statements on nuclear proliferation.

From Iraq to Iran, North Korea to Pakistan, the Bush administration has pulled so many con jobs that it is difficult for anybody to take it seriously. Unfortunately, though, the proliferation of nuclear weapons is as serious as it gets.

Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in the City & the World
by Peter Lamborn Wilson (Editor), Bill Weinberg (Editor)

“They” are buying and patenting the DNA of every lifeform. They will design your baby, and they will design the E-Coli in its colon. They will make the word “organic” mean what they want it to mean. They will use 100 times more energy than you because they know better. We can take our ‘community gardens” and move somewhere else if we don’t like progress. Yeah, go somewhere where the sun of Global Capital don’t shine. And stay there. Okay, Then. This book is headed in that direction. Want to tag along? Edited by Peter Lamborn Wilson and Bill Weinberg, with texts by Miekal And, Bernadette Cozart, Jack Collom, Sarah Ferguson, Joe Hollis, Lyx Ish, Bernadette Mayer, Carmelo Ruiz, Bill Weinberg, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and John Wright. A collection of passionate and polemical essays against the invasive development of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and elsewhere. Focused especially on the destruction of individual and community gardens, AVANT GARDENING also chronicles the triumphs and defeats of eco-resistence.

This collection of writings, assembled at a time of crisis for NYC community gardens, imagines the radical possibilities of urban gardening. Bringing together NYC history, political analysis, utopian schemes, poetic accounts of what gardening can create, and investigations into the dynamics of sustainability, community, high and low technologies, and power, this book challenges the “Supermarket to the World” ideologies of global capital. Includes work by Sarah Ferguson, Jack Collom, Carmelo Ruiz, the editors, and others.

From last week’s New York Times:

Need Talent to Exhibit in Museums? Not This Prankster
By RANDY KENNEDY

It was not nearly as dangerous as the time he sneaked into the elephant pen at the London Zoo and scrawled a graffiti message from the point of view of an elephant: “I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring.”

And it was not quite as elaborate as the stunt last year in which he spirited a stuffed rat wearing wraparound sunglasses into the Natural History Museum in London and mounted it on a wall.

But over the last two weeks, a shadowy British graffiti artist who calls himself Banksy has carried his own humorous artworks into four New York institutions – the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History – and attached them with some sort of adhesive to the walls, alongside other paintings and exhibits. Similar stunts at the Louvre and the Tate museum have earned the artist – who will not reveal his real name – a following in Europe, where he has had successful gallery shows and sold thousands of books of his artwork. But his graffiti has also landed him in legal trouble.

Elyse Topalian, a spokeswoman for the Met, said that museum officials believed that a painting found there – a small, gold-framed portrait of a woman wearing a gas mask – was hung surreptitiously on March 13. Guards noticed it and removed it from a wall near other paintings in the American wing, she said. Ms. Topalian added that no damage had been done to the wall or to other artworks.

The museum does not look kindly on such unauthorized additions to its walls. “I think it’s fair to say that it would take more than a piece of Scotch tape to get a work of art into the Met,” Ms. Topalian said.

Sally Williams, a spokeswoman for the Brooklyn Museum, said a painting – in this case, of a red-coated colonial-era military officer holding a spray-paint can, with antiwar graffiti in the background – was discovered and removed on March 16. The painting was hung between two others from the museum’s permanent collection in the American Identities galleries on the fifth floor. She said that the painting was now sitting in the museum’s conservation lab and that its fate was uncertain.

“I think the immediate issue was just to get it out of the gallery and tucked away somewhere where it couldn’t be seen,” she said.

An official at the Museum of Modern Art said that a painting of a can of cream-of-tomato soup was found hanging in a third-floor elevator lobby and taken down on March 17. A spokesman for the Museum of Natural History, where the graffiti artist apparently hung a glass-encased beetle (a real one) equipped with fighter jet wings, missiles and a satellite dish, confirmed the incident by e-mail but did not say when the work was found.

Asked whether the incidents raised security concerns for them, officials at the institutions said no, adding that they believed that they had sufficient numbers of guards and other monitoring systems.

Pictures of the illicit art installations, apparently taken by an accomplice of Banksy, were posted yesterday at woostercollective.com, a site that has become a repository of pictures of graffiti and other street and urban art. Some of the pictures show a bearded man in an overcoat and hat, looking a little like Inspector Jacques Clouseau, hanging his paintings in the museums.

Marc Schiller, a founder of the Web site, said the pictures were sent to him yesterday along with a statement from the artist that said: “This historic occasion has less to do with finally being embraced by the fine-art establishment and is more about the judicious use of a fake beard and some high-strength glue.”

Mr. Schiller said the artist had returned to London and would not consent to a telephone interview. But in an e-mail exchange yesterday afternoon, conducted with Mr. Schiller’s help, Banksy – who prefers to be called not an artist, but a “quality vandal” – said he decided to invade those four New York museums for a simple reason.

“I’ve wandered round a lot of art galleries thinking, ‘I could have done that,’ so it seemed only right that I should try,” he wrote. “These galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires. The public never has any real say in what art they see.”

He said he had entered all of the museums during normal visitors’ hours. Asked how he was able to hang his works without being noticed by museum guards or security cameras, Banksy responded rather opaquely. “You just have to glue on a fake beard and move with the times,” he said.

He added that he had thought about storming the Guggenheim, but was too intimidated. “I would have had to appear between two Picassos,” he wrote. “And I’m not good enough to get away with that.”

 

celebrate matt greene’s upcoming exhibition WE ARE THE DEAD
sunday march 27, 5-7 pm
beer, etc.
the women’s building
1727 n. spring st.
(east of chinatown at the base of the spring street bridge, parking on side of building)

From the New York Times:

Philip Lamantia, 77, Surrealist Poet, Is Dead
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

Philip Lamantia, the rapturous San Francisco poet who embraced Surrealism and later associated himself with the West Coast Beat community, died on March 7 at his apartment in San Francisco. He was 77.

The cause was heart failure, a spokesman for his publisher, City Lights Books, said.

“Philip Lamantia’s poems are about rapture as a condition,” the poet Tom Clark wrote in a review of Mr. Lamantia’s “Selected Poems, 1943-1966” (City Lights, 1967) in The New York Times Book Review. “They are spiritual and erotic at the same time. Bright and dark, the enclosed polarities of devotion. St. Teresa and Rimbaud.”

Mr. Lamantia’s path to these poetic extremes was serpentine. Born in San Francisco on Oct. 23, 1927, to Nunzio, a produce broker, and Mary Tarantino Lamantia, both of whom immigrated from Sicily as children, he began writing Poe-like poems in elementary school and promoting social revolution in junior high, from which he was briefly expelled for “intellectual delinquency.”

In his freshman year in high school, he saw a retrospective exhibition of Dali and Mir?ɬ?, which made such a powerful impression that he embraced the fantastical artistic and literary movement Surrealism.

At 16, Mr. Lamantia dropped out of school and moved to New York City. He worked as an assistant editor at View: A Magazine of the Arts, which had published poems he had written at 15, and he continued to write and publish. He met several expatriate Surrealists, including Andr?ɬ© Breton, the prophet of the movement, who declared Mr. Lamantia “a voice that rises once in a hundred years.”

After publishing his first book at 19, “Erotic Poems” (Bern Porter, 1946), Mr. Lamantia grew disillusioned with the New York scene and returned to San Francisco. He completed high school and enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, where he became part of the revolutionary left and studied subjects pertaining to Gnosticism, mysticism, eroticism and heretical thought. All the while he continued writing and publishing poems and articles.

He never graduated from Berkeley. In the 1950’s, he began to explore altered states of consciousness through hallucinogenic drugs, attending peyote rituals with various American Indian tribes. He traveled in France and Morocco, returning now and then to the United States, where he plunged himself into urban night life. He became associated with the Beat movement, although his work remained distinct from the Beats’ concerns with homosexual themes and everyday minutiae, continuing his own quest for the heterosexually erotic and the mystical.

By the time his “Selected Poems, 1943-1966” was published, he was living in Spain, fighting depression, studying mathematics and writing intermittently.

In the remaining decades of his life he returned to San Francisco, lectured on poetry at San Francisco State University and San Francisco Art Institute, and took up American Indian and environmental causes.

In 1978, he married Nancy Joyce Peters, who became his editor at City Lights and who survives him.

His distinctive surrealistic poetry was collected in four more volumes “The Blood of the Air” (1970), “Becoming Visible” (1981), “Meadowlark West” (1986) and “Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems 1943-1993” (1997), making a total of nine published in his lifetime.

His work commanded respect for inhabiting the realm of what he called “King Analogue/Queen Image/Prince Liberty. …” And he was, as Yves le Pellec, a French critic, put it, “a living link between French Surrealism and the American counterculture at its beginnings.”

COURTESY M. SIMMONS!

Next Stop, Kiosk

Building materials, energy and communication infrastructure, 2003
‘Next Stop, Kiosk’, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia

A palafita — a South American house on stilts (sometimes called “a walking house”) – is balanced on top of a group of intersecting city kiosks. The K-67 kiosk was originally designed in the late 1960s as a mobile dwelling unit by the Ljubljana-based architect Sasa Maechtig.

March 24, 2005 New York Times

Turning Trash Into Gold: A New Urban Alchemy
By CAROLE BRADEN

It is the sort of bright, bitterly cold afternoon when exposed fingers and faces instantly stiffen, but the turnout is good at a community workshop and toolshed in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. Eighteen hearty New Yorkers sit on red wooden benches, surrounded by homemade sawhorses and aging power tools.

They are here to attend Dumpster Diving 301, a course on fishing for free home-improvement materials—things like scratched doors and mismatched kitchen cupboards—from construction waste bins. Yes, in a surprising twist on continuing education these students have paid $20 to learn how to pick through trash.

It is no revelation that one person’s junk can be another’s jewel. The art of combing garbage is the subject of two recent movies by the French director Agnes Varda, and Mother Earth News ran how-to’s aimed at hippies as early as 1970.

But few would have predicted the evolution of this scrappy practice into something bordering on chic. “Mongo: Adventures in Trash” (Bloomsbury, 2004) by Ted Botha offers New Yorkcentric tips from a book dealer who builds inventory by culling sidewalks and from a suburbanite who cruises Manhattan on bulk-garbage days, struggling with her desire to take home every orphan chair and lamp.

One Web site, dumpsterworld.com, provides a forum on hunting grounds and tactics, and dumpsterdiving.meetup.com lists 171 groups of trash pickers around the globe, 52 formed in the last year. The largest, NYC Dumpster Diving Aficionados, invites newbies along for monthly forays. Naturally, the practice has splintered into specialties. The students in the Gowanus seminar, sponsored by an “art combine” called the Madagascar Institute (www.madagascarinstitute.com), were do-it-yourselfers trying to cut construction costs by sorting through nail- and-grime-ridden rejectamenta.

Their leaders were two seasoned teachers, Omar Freilla and Maureen Flaherty.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of cheap,” said Mr. Freilla, 31, the director of an environmental group in the South Bronx called the Green Worker Cooperatives. He recommended canvassing high-rent neighborhoods like the Upper East Side and Upper West Side (where “a lot of perfectly good stuff gets chucked”), conjuring visions of tin ceiling panels wearing perfectly peeling paint and moldings with pre-World War II personality, all free for the taking.

“You think you can find handrails for staircases?” asked Loren Churchill, who identified himself as an actor and yogi and who clearly could not wait to venture among the glass shards and rotting shingles.

“You have to think differently when you use old materials,” Ms. Flaherty, 30, said. Dressed in blue coveralls, she sat on a footlocker-size “window seat,” which she constructed from a found wood-frame window with a cracked pane, plywood planks and a couple of old industrial door hinges.

She held up a length of snaggled oak flooring with an angry nail protruding from it and described, to the class’s delight, an air-powered gunlike machine that can easily blow nails, even bent ones, out of boards.

After removing the nails and sawing off the jagged ends, Ms. Flaherty said, “You can cover gaps with pretty molding that you’ve found and plug the nail holes with wood fill.” She says the effort knocks about 80 percent off the cost of a new wood floor.

Like a lot of other Dumpster divers, Ms. Flaherty and Mr. Freilla—who said he and his wife plan to buy and restore a home in the South Bronx using found materials—practice the sport not only to conserve cash but also to decrease Earth-clogging waste.

The instructors devised the course after they met at a mixer held by the New York City chapter of Green Drinks International (www.greendrinks.org), a network of career environmentalists with outposts from Melbourne to Minneapolis. Mr. Freilla preaches the importance of reducing waste, even if it means lending an unofficial hand to contractors during demolition. Ms. Flaherty suggests keeping a watch for building permits and construction-size Dumpsters. For those who do not own a car or truck, she points out, a folding shopping cart may serve as a hauling assistant.

After a round of introductions‚Äîthe workshop included a housing developer and a former Californian who said she has “long-range garbage vision” and roams in knee-high boots‚Äîthe instructors declared it time to hit the streets. Ms. Flaherty, who had been out scouting that morning, led the way.

“You could do a New York kitchen with these,” she said as her followers gathered around institutional gray ceramic tiles piled on a sidewalk about 10 blocks away. Finding no takers, she walked briskly to a fenced-off dead end overlooking the Gowanus Canal. An area of rampant illegal dumping‚Äîdespite community efforts to clean it up‚Äîthe canal and its shores, she said, often serve up good stuff. Slim pickings on this day, though, beyond a chipped square of slate.

On Fourth Street near Bond Street, behind a set-design and photography studio, the group encountered a trash bin overflowing with plywood strips. “These will make nice shadow box frames,” said one participant, who also announced plans to turn the slate piece into a corner shelf.

Several blocks farther, outside a house under construction, loomed a 30-cubic-yard Dumpster piled with square beams and molding scraps. After pulling themselves up to peer inside, some divers—those who knew enough to wear old clothing, thick-soled boots and heavy work gloves—began to dig, handing down finds that included two small wood-frame windows and a genie-lamp light fixture with dents.

Trish Hicks, the Californian, showed it off. What are a few imperfections when a fixture is free?

Some defects should be warning signs, the instructors said. Tunnels in wood have usually been burrowed by termites; boards with water stains are often warped; and “the smell of cat urine does not go away,” Ms. Flaherty noted. She also suggested that gleaners with children carry lead-paint test kits, available at many hardware stores.

“If anybody wants to craft their treasures into something else, I can show you how to use the tools,” Ms. Flaherty said, ushering her shivering posse back to the workshop.

Some took her up on the offer. Others jumped into their cars and headed back to the scavenging sites in search of more perfectly good garbage.