Human for Human's sake: May 2011

fuck nationalism

ai weiwei

study of perspective – tiananmen, 1995-2010

c-print, 32,5 x 43,5 cm

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Source:

I have signed up to help MDA raise money to help combat muscular dystrophy, a disease which affects the nervous and muscular systerm. I don't know anyone directly impacted by this disease, but I feel compelled to help out and volunteer at every opportunity.

The MDA is doing a mock-lock up so that volunteers raise money as their "bail".

It is a fun spin, to get everyone to help. Even the smallest donation adds up!

Thank You.

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Sources:

MDA

My MDA Site

Wiki: Muscular Dystrophy

Candid

He took this picture of me:

It was taken on my birthday weekend, which was a tragedy.

I don't know what I was doing, but I am glad he took it.

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Memorial Day Love

Happy Memorial Day

Everyone who has and will serve: Thank You :)

I love that picture of the very patriotic eagle.
It reminds me of the tacky shirts my dad wears.

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BONNABUS!!!!

I got this envelope in the mail

Hmm, what could it be?

*brain realizes it is the same type of envelope that the bonnaroo tickets came in*

*brain starts to throw a party - hands start to quake*

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I got a bad case of Graffinitis

I want to have his babies - plural.

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want want want want

Renowned singer/songwriter Greg Graffin of the immensely influential rock band Bad Religion has just finished a sold-out tour and in the coming months will be addressing a slightly quieter though no less rapt audience. Graffin has a second career as an esteemed author and academic. The venerated punk icon obtained a PhD in zoology from Cornell University, has served as a lecturer in life sciences and paleontology at UCLA and recently published a best selling science memoir entitled Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World Without God which was heralded by the Chicago Tribune as “A worldview eloquently expressed.”

In the coming months Graffin will shift his talents to the revered Ivy League institution of Cornell University where he will be teaching Evolution in the fall semester (August 24th to December 11th). “This is the first year of three that I am slated to help develop the course and lecture at Cornell,” Graffin explains. “I have a colleague who is a gifted geneticist, Richard Harrison, who will be co-teaching with me. I only have to lecture on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That leaves plenty of time to head overseas on the weekends!”

In additional news, Greg Graffin has been honored in the science world. In this month’s Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society in London, paleontologists including Dr. Jingmai O’Connor, have discovered an ancient bird fossil in the Gansu Province of north-western China, and have named this important find “Qiliania graffini” in honor of the singer. As O’Connor explains, “The species name is in honor of Dr. Gregory Graffin, PhD: paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, professor, rock star, and inspiration to numerous budding and established scientists around the world.”

Dr. Graffin responds, “I am so happy that they have given me the privilege of having an important fossil bird named in my honor. My love of birds now must pass to the Cretaceous and the wonderful finds from China that [the authors] are elucidating”

Ukulele Love

Following the steps of tiny tim and amanda palmer:

Eddie Vedder has taken up the ukulele. Each song is fucking beautiful!

NPR First Listen: Eddie Vedder Ukulele Songs

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Satellite

it's no shame that
love's a game that
i can only play with you
what i'm saying
is i've been saving
my love for you

i've seen the light, i'm
satisfied that
the brightest star is you
satellite, i'm
holding tight
beaming back to you

days turn into
nights turn into
days turn into today
don't think i'm out playing
cause i'm inside waiting
for you

i've felt the light, i'm
satisfied that
the highest star is you
satellite, i'm
holding tight
beaming back to you

don't you worry
i believe your story
you were put away
for something you didn't do
what i'm saying
is i'm saving
my love

Flat Earth

Joplin, MO

:( heartbreaking :(

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I made this moving picture to show the before and after:

Pic Sources:

Daily Mail

woo hoo

i love bob dylan and today he is 70 years young.

stay forever young baby and hook me up with your son <3

Manicure Monday: Lady Fungi

The first manicure monday of my 30s :) I wanted to make something that my grandma would like and she loved red nails. I tried this:

and failed epically!

He thinks it looks like a lady bug, I was going for mushroom cap.

Either way I like it :)

nom nom nom nom

MONSTER MONDAY: BORN THIS WAY

!!!FUCK YEAH BORN THIS WAY!!!

wear unicorn inspired clothing <3

You know you are psyched:

Sober Monday

My cousin e-mailed my my grandmother's death certificate. It is so weird reading it.

Official cause of death: Cardiac Arrest (non-traumatic)

I am bummed out about.

I opened up my trusty 3 subject note book and saw this:

instant pick me up :D

the monster is far away, but his presence is everywhere!

AIAS + Architecture

As Marketing Manager of the Valencia AIAS Chapter - I started working on my duties.

We do not take "office" until the beginning of the Fall Semester but I can't wait to get things off the ground. We have gone viral:

AIAS Valencia on YouTube

AIAS Valencia on TUMBLR

AIAS Valencia on Twitter

joint / follow :D

lol - wtf

NPR's Article on this farce linked to this site:

Family Radio which had the picture above; it is too good to pass up.

I love that: THE BIBLE GUARANTEES IT.

Get ready for the let down, and when you finally see the light:

WELCOME !!!

Rapture Party

There's tons of them going on today - as well as looting festivals.

I love that churches are doing this because it reinforces the reality that THERE IS NO GOD. Sorry to shit on your fantasy parade, but like Santa - God is just a made up character to entice the weak into doing and following MAN'S WILL.

Don't kill/steal/rape/maim should be bred into our collective consciousness -

I don't need dogma to remind me right from wrong.

GOD'S NOT COMING because GOD'S NOT REAL

lol for "believing"

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Sources:

LOL Jesus

Oz Atheist blog

Garage Sale Madness!!!

My mom and I had a garage sale. It was a perfect way to make some extra change, clean out the garage and my grandma's old room. Along the way I found some bonnaroooooooo things. Here is an extra camelback I'll be taking to 'roo for my cousins girlfriend to wear:

we have so much extra stuff from last year: sharing is not a problem.

Rem Koolhaas' Preservation

An article about architecture and preservation from the point of view of Rem Koolhaas. I bolded parts of the article I found interesting.

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pic: a|n blog

In 1848, Marx and Engels famously prophesied that within capitalism, "all that is solid melts into air." Kicking off the New Museum's Festival of Ideas for the New City earlier this month, Rem Koolhaas offered what might be considered an audacious update of that analysis, which would read something like this: within capitalism, "some things that are solid melt into air — and some things turn to stone forever." He was speaking about the concept of "heritage," the hypnotic lure that the past exerts on us, and the way that it can come to choke off the vitality of the present. "Embedded in huge waves of development, which seem to transform the planet at an ever-accelerating speed, there is another kind of transformation at work: the area of the world declared immutable through various regimes of preservation is growing exponentially," states a manifesto-like text accompanying an exhibition Koolhaas has put together on the same themes for New Museum's newly annexed Bowery storefront space. "A huge section of our world (about 12%) is now off-limits, submitted to regimes we don't know, have not thought through, cannot influence."

The severe and stylish Koolhaas is something of a one-person festival of ideas himself, so there could be few people more appropriate to kick off the New Museum's symposium. He made his name as a penner of experimental urbanist manifestos ("Delirious New York," for instance, his 1978 "retrospective manifesto" for the Big Apple) long before he was a practicing architect. His keynote address was characteristically audacious, sarcastic, and slightly shapeless, as if struggling to hold more ideas than it could contain. Among other things, he breezed over such huge topics as a defense of the historical importance of socialist architecture, and a devastating critique of the ideology underlying Tate Modern's Turbine Hall exhibition program. (On the latter point, his main thrust is that huge spaces encourage huge art that then encourages huge spaces, ad absurdum.)

But the core of the talk was a concrete deconstruction of the opposition between "preservation" and "progress," which Koolhaas sees as flip sides of the same coin, the one bearing the contradictions of the other. The first preservationist initiatives coincide with the French Revolution (the Commission des Monuments, 1790) and then the Industrial Revolution in England (Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 1877). From there, preservation has more or less spread with the march of modernity, which is to say the onrush of capitalist development and the dislocation that goes along with it. This makes perfect sense: As nature is despoiled, you make parks; as history is profaned, you declare monuments.

Over time, Koolhaas argues, the kinds of things that have been considered preservable have broadened — originally just monuments, now expansive and maddeningly indistinct "current and past social expressions" — while the time necessary for something to warrant official status as heritage has shortened, from centuries to now just a few years. Koolhaas argues that this accelerating mania for the past is approaching an inflection point: "Eventually it will become prospective," he hypothetized in his address. "We will preserve things before they are even finished."

Within the visual arts there is a major parallel. MoMA was a radical institution when it was founded, because a "Museum of Modern Art" was considered a paradox — museums were for antique culture. Later, this idea was superceded by proliferating museums of "contemporary art," a shift in a relationship to time that the New Museum symbolizes in its very name. And even more recently, much critical ink has been spilled over how the concept of postmodernism — a paradigm that at least tried to explain the present as some kind of historical epoch — has yielded to the vexing craze for "emerging art," a haphazard euphoria for the present without any theory of itself at all.

Yet the implications of this temporal compression are more pressing for architecture than for art, because architects are put up against the concrete problems of how to create living spaces for people, and so hit the limits of an overcrowded present more quickly. Koolhaas gives the example of his own 1998 Maison à Bordeaux house in France, which was almost immediately declared a landmark, thereby complicating the process of redesigning it for an actual living occupant. I remember being at a public hearing a few years ago about the Museum of Arts and Design's ultimately successful proposal to revamp Edward Durrell Stone's "Lollipop building" on Columbus Circle. After parades of impassioned pronouncements about the need to preserve the quirky structure (including several from Tom Wolfe in his ice-cream suit), the sole person to stand up in defense of the remodeling was a representative of the American Institute of Architects, who was booed. To help sort out these disputes, Koolhaas proposed — at least semi-seriously — that UNESCO create a "Convention Concerning the Demolition of World Cultural Junk" to complement its "Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and National Heritage." He also presented a preservationist scheme that he had dreamed up for Beijing, a kind of parody of Le Corbusier's infamous Plan Voisin that would have torn up Paris to put in a grid of utopian sky-scraper tower blocks. Koolhaas proposes zoning a regular grid of boxes onto the map of the city. Everything within their borders would be preserved, whereas everything outside of them would be fair game to destroy. The complete formal neutrality would guarantee that a cross-section of material was saved, without political arguments getting in the way, thereby freeing up the urban fabric for salutary change.

In a churlish New Yorker dispatch from Koolhaas's keynote, Paul Goldberger called the architect's concerns about the heritage industry "overstated," and essentially argued that worries about preservation have been around forever. This seems rather ungenerous, as the point here is not that these dilemmas are new or novel but that there is a trajectory to them that makes them ever-more insistent. The question I have is about the answers Koolhaas offers. He starts from the notion that the problematic and increasingly indiscriminate character of "preservation" is overdetermined by its relation to the madness of our underlying model of indiscriminate development — but then he implies that the problem is not this economic model itself, but the fact that we don't have an adequate theory of what "preservation" means, or how it should work. Well, obviously we should think through the implications of declaring something part of our heritage, and the underlying agendas that this gesture involves. But left on its own, this line of argument is a little like trying to deal with the effects of a devastating downpour with an umbrella; by all means, let's get everyone umbrellas, but this won't stop the flooding.

Ultimately, if Koolhaas's proposed solutions sound dystopian or satirical, I think that this is because the very nature of the problem he is identifying makes it more and more difficult to resolve his two roles — as visionary theorist and as practical architect offering workable solutions — into one. The actual solution is not a better theory of preservation, but a more humane model of economic progress — a better, more harmonious way of living in general. In the absence of this, the contradictions are only bound to pile up, with or without a theory or clever plan. This, it seems to me, is the sobering underlying suggestion of Koolhaas's address, and it is a thought that is definitely worth preserving.

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Source:

ART Info: Can Rem Koolhaas Save Architecture From Preservation?

Design Boom: Cronocaos at The New Museum