In the 1930s, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA’s founding director, tirelessly scoured the front and back spaces of commercial galleries, artists’ studios, and museums, … keenly observing display and installation methods. … Barr had MoMA’s walls lined with plain beige monk’s cloth, a cotton fabric that, according to Philip Johnson, who founded the Department of Architecture and Design in 1930, was “the most neutral thing he could get.” … The cloth soon gave way to white wall paint, although in Johnson’s opinion “the beige color was far better for painting than white.”

Decades later, a similar debate occurred at another iconic New York gallery; Frank Lloyd Wright was furious at the proposed colour for the Guggenheim’s walls:

S.O.S.! … A picture-hanger (named Sweeney) is authorized … to barge in on the architect of the museum and paint the interior dead-white – thus tearing the inside from the outer walls of the organic building. … ¶ A pity to have a masterpiece (it is) daubed to death at the end to gratify a metempsychosis for the white-sepulchre for a museum.

Watching paint dry is not so dull after all.

Yet more precocious was the proposal for a pyramidal skyscraper which would, fittingly enough for the Victorian metropolis, be a tower as necropolis, its 50 or so storeys housing the bodies of as many as 5 million Londoners, slotted into a fittingly protomodernist cellular structure. It was presented before parliament, and passed over for the somewhat less demented Kensal Green cemetery.

Language is enriched when it incorporates slang, neologisms, immigrant inventions and street talk that say things that were never needed to be said before, or that we were never willing or able to say to each other. Language is corrupted when it is made bland, vague, superficial, flabby or meaningless.

Frustrated by the phrase “world class”, Renny Pritikin makes a neat point about language. This is something I want to keep in mind whenever I write. [via]

MeFi — nonmyopicdave — East of the Sun, West of the Moon

[The Howard Government] severely limit[ed] the circumstances in which union officials could act on safety issues, or in which construction workers could take industrial action over safety issues. ¶ The only problem was that safety was not merely a pretext for union activity. Construction is up with road transport and mining as one of the most dangerous occupations in the country. And following the imposition of Andrews’ legislation and the extension of the building industry code, deaths in the constructions industry increased massively, from 3.14 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2004 to 3.86 in 2005, 5.6 in 2006, 4.48 in 2007 and 4.27 in 2008. [...] ¶ Despite clear warnings to the Minister that the changes would endanger safety, there was no media outrage or claims of a debacle. Indeed, in mid-2007 The Australian was lauding the Government’s reforms. The only mention of safety by The Oz was to note that fewer days had been lost due to “abuse of occupational health and safety issues”. More dead workers didn’t get a mention.

Dangerous industries need strong unions — not WorkChoices II. [prev]

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(And don’t miss her One-Hour Homemade Christmas Special.)

Fake beards have played supporting roles in several notable international incidents. When Australia’s Nugan Hand Bank collapsed in 1980, amid accusations of having trafficked drugs to support American intelligence operations, one of the institution’s founders was allegedly smuggled out of the country in a fake beard. Antonio Mendez, the former chief of disguise for the CIA, used fake facial hair extensively in Cold War Russia. He often put false mustaches on agents going to pick up Russian nuclear secrets from a double-agent called Trinity, so they would blend in with the other comrades. The CIA is so keenly aware of the importance of facial hair that it twice concocted schemes to remove Fidel Castro’s beard, hoping that his nude face would seem less authoritative to the Cuban people.

For some jobs you want a realistic beard, for others you want something “zany” so that witnesses can’t remember anything else about you. Fascinating.

So instead of the comically slow, instransigent, late-arriving government servicepersons of 20th century legend, the ALP unleashed a lean, efficient, 21st century employment market that could put young men in harm’s way with unparalleled efficiency and speed. ¶ But even so, four young people didn’t die directly because of a brave new world policy in Canberra. They died because of coalface issues: inadequate supervision, inadequate training, inadequate OH&S. All because a de-unionised workforce of contractors was let loose in a Wild West cash-grab, and the cowboys moved in.

The CodeOrgan analyses the “body” content of any web page and translates that content into music. The CodeOrgan uses a complex algorithm to define the key, synth style and drum pattern most appropriate to the page content.

Turns out my blog is in the key of A minor. Or rather, it was in A minor — changing the content changes the key. With every new post, it sings a different song. [via]

Undoubtedly, one of the prime reasons why Dick attracted attention from the FBI was a series of bizarre letters he penned to the Bureau in the early 1970s, in which he described his personal knowledge of an alleged underground Nazi cabal that was attempting to covertly manipulate science fiction writers to further advance its hidden cause. ¶ And the nature of that cause was even more bizarre: to initiate a Third World War by infecting the American population with syphilis.

[via]

He thinks, in other words, that my article on Breaker Morant should become a terrorist crime. ¶ No, seriously. That’s what he thinks.

Jeff Sparrow’s perfect response to an accusation of treason.

[T]he iPad is a device for the life between buildings. ¶ If we approach it spatially—in terms of context of use I mean, rather than the device itself—it becomes clear why I think it’ll be a success. [...] ¶ As software becomes a service, data resides in the cloud, various forms of wireless connectivity coalesce over the city, and yet face-to-face physical connection becomes more important than ever, a device like the iPad becomes obvious. The cloud is the connective tissue between these spaces, the software provides the platform for interaction with information, the tablet is the tool, and the forum is the city.

Kim Stanley Robinson on scifi as the realism of our time:

I think it’s very true that we are living in a science fiction novel that we all collaborate on, and it’s because everything that science fiction was about through its historical named period, the twentieth century, has kind of come true. And also we live in a world that is so intensely structured by science and technology that we can’t get out of it. If we were to get out of it would still be a science fiction move, the retreat to the farm. So it’s hegemonic, you can’t escape it, we’re in that world created by science and technology. [...] ¶ When you slow down? Well, that’s another—you feel that too. This is like when your connection to the Internet goes out for three days, or your phone line, or when your cell phone dies—these moments when you’re suddenly not having the sixth sense of the cloud…