What do you suppose would happen to someone if they were caring for a child, took the child to a pool, and watched the child fall in as they sat there, not only doing nothing, but also actively stopping the first responders from saving the child?
We can all agree that they would be arrested on a variety of charges – “Depraved Indifference,” or “Criminal Negligence,” and additional charges for interfering with rescue personnel. Undoubtedly, they would be vilified across the globe as a sociopath with zero empathy.
Now let's consider what the Republicans are doing to the environment. There was a time as recent as the early 70s when Republicans cared deeply about our planet. It was Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. But my, how things changed. In 1980 Reagan was quoted as saying trees caused more pollution than automobiles, thus signaling the start of the official GOP War-on-Mother-Nature.
Since then, Mother Earth has repeatedly been battered and slut-shamed by the GOP, but enough is enough; it's time to bring them to account. But how?
In the now-infamous Citizens United case, the Supreme Court essentially ruled that corporations are now people in that they have rights previously reserved for individuals. The Republican Party is an official organization; it is registered as such under the law. Anyone who registers as a Republican or is endorsed by the GOP is part of that organization.
Now that the firewall between laws governing individuals and corporations has been breached and corporations have the individual right of political speech, it stands to reason that they must now also be subjected to criminal law as well. It is not a stretch to then also include non-profit incorporated organizations such as the Republican Party. Therein lies the legal structure for bringing charges against the GOP and its members.
Let's look at the basis for charges. First, the GOP has repeatedly stated that it wants to kill cops. Well, not literally stated that they want to kill actual cops, but they want to kill—eliminate--the “cops” guarding the environment: the EPA. Without that agency going after polluters by regulating companies and then punishing them for violating environmental regulations, we'll go back to the bad old days where polluters were free to dump the most vile and deadly chemicals into the air, water, and earth while the government stood by, with zero resources to investigate these instances or punish the guilty parties. As it is, 40+ years after the birth of the EPA and Superfund cleanups, only about 20% of these sites have been cleaned up, leaving a remaining 1200 hotspots of contamination on the list.
But I bet we can get the Kochs to pinky-swear that if all EPA regulations disappeared, they would play nicely and not pollute anything even though they’ve been known to have some shenanigans with the EPA.
Hmmm, maybe not.
So by proposing to kill these cops, they're proposing to kill those who are out there to protect us, just as the actual police protect us.
Then there's the charge of depraved indifference. Going back to the schmuck from earlier, let's say he walked in and there were signs that the pool that was a drowning hazard and no children were to be left unattended. Then he passed 100 people and 97 of them who were lifeguards said to be careful and keep the child away from the pool but three of them were just some random yahoos off the street said there's no danger and feel free to even toss them in, and then said of course the lifeguards are going to get all alarmist and tell you not to throw the kid in the pool because, silly, they're just looking to make money by whipping up everyone's fear.
Pretty ridiculous. I think we'd have a crowd with pitchforks and torches outside the jail ready to string this guy up by his neck and be openly mocking the other three clowns as brainless swine.
There should be similar rage about the same sort of bullshit being peddled by the Right about how climate change is either an outright hoax or is entirely natural and man has nothing to do with it. Well, Miami Beach is now starting to have flooding problems during normal high tides. A huge chunk of Louisiana's bayous have gone under. The Antarctic has been experiencing record warm summers and in the past two decades, temperatures have been rising with almost every month topping the same month of the previous year. Ninety-seven lifeguards.. errrr… climatologists out of 100 tell us climate change is real and it is greatly exacerbated by man.
We're killing this planet. One has to be willfully blind to ignore the signs, and that's depraved indifference.
It struck me that there was very little talk about global warming and the environment at the second presidential debate. I thought it was very ironic. As horrible as Reagan was about the environment, even he was convinced to sign onto the then-groundbreaking Montreal Protocol which outlawed the CFCs that were causing the ozone layer to disappear. People don't remember Reagan going Full Pinko Tree hugger but bless his jellybean-eating soul, he did and scientists now say the damage was stopped and the ozone hole is getting smaller.
And with that, we turn the question of guilt or innocence to you, the jury.
One of the images I associate with New York City, is that of millions of people’s shoes hitting the pavement: People with tunnel vision walking to the tunnels where subways will take them to their jobs where they will most likely practice more tunnel vision.
There is so much going on here, that sometimes, that tunnel vision is necessary.
Operative word being “sometimes.”
If we stopped to bite at every piece of the Big Apple that strikes our fancy, we’d probably all look like hyperactive puppies being taken on our first walk, sniffing and pissing on the entire city.
With so many options always available that make us wanna squat and sniff at every turn, the act of scheduling a date with a friend can turn into quite an event unto itself.
Here’s typical text message exchange between “friends” planning a date:
· Hey, I miss you. What’s your schedule like next week?
· I’m free this day, and that day during these hours.
· Oh, that doesn’t work for me, I can only do this day or that day, at this specific time.
A few texts go by, calendars are double-checked, Siri fucks up a few exchanges (she has trouble with lisping and Canadian accents), naps are taken, a day or two pass and then:
· Ok, two weeks from now, I’m free one of the days you’re free.
· Shit sorry, 2 weeks from now I’ll be out of town for work.
· The following week then?
· Ok, sounds good.
· What should we do?
More texts are exchanged. Dinner? Where? Drinks? Where? Maybe a movie? Someone goes on Rotten Tomatoes. Nothing worthy (or non-worthy but with hot shirtless men) is out. More back and forth. You finally settle on doing something and the communication concludes with:
· Ok great, let’s pencil it in. (Pay attention to the word “pencil”)
Date day arrives and of course something “comes up.” You cancel, and you don’t really feel any remorse. In fact, you feel relief. Someone says, “Let’s reschedule.” Then whole process starts all over again.
This phenomenon of making a date and cancelling is called, “The New York Cancel.”
I myself am a great practitioner and advocate. I used to do it a lot actually. And it was done to me a lot. So I began to wonder why.
The New York Cancel is a perfect way to make a date, not actually go on a date, but reap about 80% of the benefits of going out on a date without having to spend the time, the money, or wasting good energy on a so-so "friend”. So economical and effective!
One of the most striking things I noticed here, is that many people only keep around “happy hour friends.” This is the term I use for the friend you never speak to sober. The friend you only divulge secrets and fears to when he/she is inebriated and likely to forget everything that’s been told. That’s the friend you’re never really gonna have a real conversation with or certainly one that he/she/you will want to remember.
Those friends solely sought out to beat the loneliness of the city, most likely caused by the disconnect of walking around surrounded by emotional and mental walls all day long; perfect candidates for The New York Cancel.
That’s the thing about New York, with its numerous bars touting happy hours, and all the busy buzzing of everyone around. It’s the perfect set up to spend poor quality time with people you have poor quality relationships with. But busy you are, loser.
A few years back, I decided this was not enough. I made a list of the people in my life, and I crossed out all the people who I had never spent time with 1) Before 9 pm and 2) In a state of sobriety.
For the two remaining people on the list, this made a tremendous change in my life. It helped me filter out the “happy hour friends” and only hold on to “the keepers.” I still occasionally perform the good old New York Cancel, but the difference here, is that I genuinely feel bad about cancelling… yeah right!
And planning a date with my keepers is much simpler. There is no need to do anything fancy, showy or expensive with these people. Sometimes it’s a simple as:
* Hey, I’m really tired and just wanna sit on my couch and watch shitty TV. Wanna come over.
Tuesday. A weak day. The oddest day of the week for me. If I could emote what prime numbers would feel like, it would feel like a Tuesday. On this Tuesday I was going through my usual routine. That meant searching through Tumblr, smoking weed, watching anime and waking up late. But not this Tuesday. I woke up early.
First thing I remember is the light, the way it weaved its way from the door into my room was like a snake slithering through grass. I could’ve sworn I heard it whisper. Entranced by this dance of light, I was shocked by the sound of the door slamming as my roommate left for work. At the very same moment the tail of this light entered my room and the door shut. It was a beautiful moment. Symmetrical. Even. It must have been designed that way. The door slamming and the light entering my room was a key to a secret place that I magically opened.
I meditate a lot, usually in odd places like the shower or even while taking a dump. I very rarely, if ever, performed the classic meditation practice of ‘quieting the mind.’ But this Tuesday, there was no choice. My mind quieted me. In what seemed like 5 minutes felt like 2 days but was more like 2 seconds. I opened my eyes and holy shit, this light possessed my room. It was ethereal but present. I started thinking I was tripping but I didn’t do any drugs all week. I just sat still and then “it” happened. I had a transcendental experience that to this day I cannot fully explain. A violet light came over me. I could see visions of planets and places I’ve never experienced before. I was having my moment with the universe and it was incredible. I was limitless. Blissful. Nirvana, on a Tuesday.
It's 1:25am and the monkey on my back is screaming. For the past 8 hours or so I've been watching football and streaming episodes of The Americans (a most excellent series) and have laid off the politics. But now... the monkey demands its due: I need my political fix.
In days of old, I would have been fairly fucked. Maybe—just maybe—I could have gone down to the corner bodega to see if the early additions of the dailies had been delivered. If not, I could have squeezed by on the evening edition. In later years, we got the 24-hour television news cycle first with CNN and then its bastard progeny, Fox and MSNBC and its foreign cousins the BBC and now Al Jazeera.
This is good stuff, but still the body became numbed. We needed MORE! We needed BETTER! Van Halen’s “Mean Streets” was dead on: “We're looking for some new kicks, ones like you ain't never seen.” Now, we have our new kick.
We have the Brave New World of always-on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and blogs. Their very existence has dropped a bomb in the gas tank of “Old Media.” Before, teams of reporters, fact checkers, and editors determined what would go out into the public eye and candidates had two options by which to pimp their viewpoint: create news by a speech or press release or buy advertising. If, say, Senator XYZ wanted to take a swipe at his election opponent Mr. ABC, he could give a speech and hope the media would pick it up or he could produce an advertisement pointing to Mr. ABC's long-standing unhealthy preoccupation with young goats, drop off the tape along with buckets of lucre, and the ad would soon be up and running, filling in space between stories on the evening news and during breaks in the latest sitcom.
No more. Now things can get posted directly, sometimes by the candidate themselves. It was fascinating to watch Trump melt down on Twitter deep into the night after Megyn Kelly was oh-so-mean to him at the first debate. If I want Scott Walker's latest thoughts—even if they are filtered via his campaign staff—on how he wants to destroy all unions and eliminate all those pesky EPA regulations, I can check Facebook. If I have the desire to melt my brain cells faster than with a bad meth habit, I can catch his latest stump speech unedited on YouTube.
The Old Ways are now dying. Who under the age of 40 even watches network TV? There are so many cable networks from which to choose and many people have cut the umbilical cord and now stream shows. It's not like the old days when you sat down and watched the local news at 6pm, the national news at 6:30, and an evening slate of prime-time shows and then the 11pm news, on your choice of NBC, CBS, or ABC. Now, new reaches our phones the second it breaks, popping up on our feeds and spreading exponentially, like the old shampoo commercial: “And they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.” Hit “post,” and you’ve hit hundreds, if not millions of screens.
For candidates, the best thing is the ability to spread their message for next to nothing.
This will have an impact. In the last election, Obama and Romney combined spent about $2.04 billion. No matter how many times I see that figure, it still makes me queasy. Out of that, $900 million--45%--went towards advertising.
This go-around, buying huge chunks of airtime might not be as necessary. The “Social Media Director” is now one of the most important people on a campaign. If we don't see something from a candidate posted at least every twelve hours, we start to wonder if they've been kidnapped by aliens.
In many ways, this can be considered a good thing. Imagine, if suddenly candidates didn't need to cover a $500 million advertising bill.
On the flip side, a dark danger arises. Without a skeptical reporter asking hard questions and using a candidate's words and challenging, or even contradicting them as part of an overall story, a lot of bullshit gets introduced with nary a challenge. Case in point, many on those on the Right state that under Obama there is an open war on police, and that cop-killings are out of control. Cop-killings are down about 25% this year, and there are far fewer under Obama than under Bush Jr and Sr and Reagan. And therein lies the rub - and explains why I spend perhaps too much time commenting on right-wing sites. Our mission here at Billy Boy is to counter the lies and half-truths put out there so you, Dear Reader, can make an informed decision. So while having a direct conduit to voters via social media can be a good thing, remember the words of legendary journalist H.L. Mencken: “The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.” In today's world, the reader must also play the role of the reporter and to that end, stay skeptical, my friends.
Neighborhoods of New York City is a series of cultural wayfinders that investigates the historical and contemporary experiences of unique neighborhoods in New York City to guide you through the known and unknown of any neighborhood.
Buying loose cigarettes in New York City can be a delicate affair for the uninitiated. In any neighborhood, if you don't have an ambassador, your success rate will be significantly lower, possibly due to the fact that selling loose cigarettes is, well, illegal, and deli owners don't want to go to jail. I believe the cited reason by the authorities regarding the criminality of selling loosies is public safety or some nonsense (yes - imagine some bureaucrat putting the words "public safety" and "cigarettes" in the same sentence) but more likely because the city is just hating on bodegas because they don't get a cut.
In any case, when a friend of mine visited me in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn during my brief residence there, I told him where to go and how much they charge (usually 50c) and he returned frustrated. I had a feeling that would happen.
I went out and followed my own procedure and sure enough, I came back with the loose cigarette and said to my friend "it's prolly because they don't know you bro. If I was with you, you would've been good."
Despite the rapid gentrification creeping over Brooklyn like a swath of acidic smog (or pretty little doves and orchids, depending on your vantage point), it's nice to see this tradition from a once poor neighborhood- one that bears in mind both financial difficulties and justifiable paranoia of the authorities - still persisting to this day.
Preferred spots
Castro's - Good Mexican. Cheap Mexican food
Ruthie's - Soul food spot that like Castro's, has been around well before AM New York declared Clinton Hill a "millennial hotspot." Irregular hours. Very irregular. Ruthie’s is closed seasonally.
SoCo - Newer, but arguably the most poppin’ establishment in the area. It's a restaurant and bar but you get the feeling people travel from all over the borough to see what's up with the chicken and waffles the way they would a Janet concert. Southern comfort food with outdoor seating. They have a stupid rule about hats like a lot of boogie black spots do but besides that it's poppin’.
Wray's - Neighbors SoCo. No silly hat rule that I'm aware of. Specializes in Caribbean food, and for a short time, was partially owned by Dee & Ricky. I like my poison straight, but they have good cocktails if you're into that sort of thing.
RIP Maggie Brown - They had the best damn fried fish po’ boy I've ever experienced. I'm pretty serious about no pork on my fork, but one time they kept the bacon on it despite my asking for them to make it without the swine and I had half of the sandwich before realizing it. I boycotted them for 16 months.
Happy Labor Day from BiLLY BoY. To celebrate the social and economic achievements of American laborers, please enjoy Norman Green’s homage to the working man, Huddled Masses.
To view this and more of Norman’s work, visit the Norman Green Archives.
We first learned about your work when we discovered one of the suicide stamps you’d placed in a book we’d checked out from New York Public Library. Your record of this intervention was realized in a book you made that assembled scans of each of the stamps you’d placed in each of the books. When you start a new project, are you crystal clear as to the final form that it will take?
Usually. Mostly. Not always. I’m more comfortable when I know where I’m going. That way I can pace and plan, plot and strategize. I’m good at worrying and terrified of failure. In my heart I know how productive failure can be—one of my heroes, Jack Halberstam, wrote an amazing book about it called the Queer Art of Failure. The truth is I’m better when I know exactly what I want.
This is Water by David Foster Wallace (from The Author of This Book Committed Suicide), aaronkrach.com
You published a novel, Half-Life, in 2004. What’s the first book you ever read? What is the last book you’ve read?
I remember so clearly a favorite Bugs Bunny book. He builds a rocket ship and blasts off but crashes minutes later. Bugs thinks he’s on a new planet but really he exits his crushed spacecraft on a busy construction site. He thinks the huge cranes and earth-moving trucks are aliens. I remember I thought this was hilarious and magical. I do not remember how the book ends.
Right now I’m reading the Diary of Anne Frank for the first time. The last book I finished (and loved) was Hold Still, the memoir by photographer Sally Mann.
Are books dead? If they are, how are you contributing to their death? If books are still relevant, how are you contributing to their relevance?
Can they be dead and relevant? Or neither? New technology keeps threatening to kill off what came before. Television vs. Radio. Yet radio is still here and amazing. Radiolab is genius. Now it’s streaming vs. cable vs. movie theaters. Same with books. Massive change, no doubt. And yet there is nothing like taking a book in hand and letting the world disappear. Digital reading is useful and faster and distracting. I can click away and leave the magic realm. If I read a paper book I can get lost, become devoted, and trapped, wrapped in a story and a whole new world.
Bachelor’s Jam (aaronkrach.com)
Last year I started a series of book sculptures called Bachelor’s Jam. I preserved books by writers who abused alcohol in the alcohol they drank. For example, vintage John Cheever paperbacks are sealed in glass jars filled with vodka. Truman Capote’s books are sealed in gin. The books are preserved and destroyed simultaneously. I’m very interested in these contradictions.
When did you know you wanted to be an artist?
I think I always wanted to be an artist. Even as a kid I saw artists as people with special permission. They could do things the rest of the world thought was crazy or considered taboo. I’m sure it’s the values artists are allowed to claim and promote that hooked me: experimentation, an open-mind, asking questions, and finding the magic all around us.
Do you want to be famous?
Yeah, why not? Then again, have you seen what fame can do to people? Yikes. I am sure that I want my work to be seen. I think about my audiences and what they may get out of my work. Reading Anne Frank’s diary reminds me that I could never write one because: What’s the point? I need an audience for feedback. I need viewers to see and read and respond. Hopefully each new work contains a response to previous audience reactions.
Is art important? Or even necessary?
Completely. But I know it is also useless, which is why art is so damn special, and exceedingly important.
If you weren’t doing art, what would you be doing?
Supreme Court Justice. Doctor. Maybe landscape architecture, which is also known as gardening.
What’s your current project?
I just finished a new art book called Almost Everything (Dark Pools). It’s a shadow version of a 1977 book I found, a modest paperback catalog from the Museum of Modern Art for an exhibition of Mies Van Der Rohe’s furniture. It was Massimo Vignelli and is ridiculously elegant. But something about it felt so bittersweet the longer I studied it. I think the utopianism of Van Der Rohe’s furniture is heartbreaking in light of how awful the 20th Century turned out to be. Design didn’t save us from our own worst impulses.
Interior pages from Almost Everything (aaronkrach.com)
For my new version, I inverted the book in every possible way. Black is white. Matte is shiny. The cover image is screen-printed by hand instead of machine-made. I removed all the text except for numerals. The result is quite strange and lovely, dark and seductive in a very different way than the original.
Unfortunately it’s not illegal to be a bad neighbor. The guy next door who tunes his guitar until 2 a.m.? Those idiots upstairs who keep throwing beer bottles out the window and into the back yard? Making dinner or washing dishes shouldn’t sound like a Mardi Gras parade. I’ve seen National Geographic specials of lion and tigers pacing back and forth for hours on-end, but when your upstairs neighbor’s doing it, it freaks me out and really pisses me off.
The following is a list of the best ways to level the playing field with your neighbors from hell. Are these suggestions passive-aggressive? Absolutely. Will they do anything to stop your neighbor’s anti-social behavior? Doubtful. In fact, they might escalate it. But if you’re looking for immediate gratification by pissing them off with retribution, these suggestions should bear fruit. You’ll go to bed feeling validated, saying “I’m such a prick,” but knowing that they asked for it, douche bags that they are…
1. Garbage in the hallway. You need to get rid of that old lasagna anyway. Rotten fruits and vegetables are cheap and effective sources of skank after ripening over a couple of steamy, summer days. Leave an opened garbage bag next to your neighbor’s door. It’ll stink up the hallway and everyone will assume they did it. When you see the neighbor in the hall, relish the look on their face when you say, “What dumbass would leave their garbage in the hallway?!” Once they remove subject trash to the outside, repeat until you see camera placed in hallway. Cease activities immediately.
2. Noisy sex. Fun for you, miserable for them. It’s a win-lose situation. Perfect. All you need is a wobbly headboard 2-4 inches away from the wall and a consenting partner. The knocking will keep your neighbor up all night and leave them exhausted at work the next day. Furthermore, they’re understandably jealous as hell. Unless you’re Superman and can keep it up to keep them up all night long, find electric sump pump at Home Depot, read a Rube Goldberg How-to book and let a little ingenuity keep the headboard rocking while you and the misses watch the late show and gloat over your neighbor’s distress. An occasional grunt or scream will spice up the constant pounding. Sweet!
3. Burn your dinner. Throw those left-overs that you held back from the garbage bag into a big pot, place on stove, turn up flame, open front door, pretend to fall asleep while recovering from last night’s sex marathon. If the neighbor doesn’t come running over first, turn on fan to blow stink out from apartment in the direction of their front door. Bonus points if the smoke triggers the fire alarm. Awesome aggravation!
4. Hoard hot water. Leave the hot water running all night so your neighbor has to take an ice cold shower in the morning. This payback solution has unfortunate wasteful environmental consequences, but maybe your neighbor should have thought of that first before slamming their door every morning on their way out to work. Dicks!
5. Build a loft bed. Maybe now’s a good time to start that home improvement project you’ve been dreaming of. Build a loft bed in your spare time, much more satisfying if you build everything from scratch. Saw the wood, nails are much more sturdy than screws. Hammer ho! Finish the beautiful work of art with oil-based paint. Lasts so much longer and fumes are guaranteed to cause a world-class headache. Casually mention how you have no carpentry experience so it might take a while to finish. When you’re finally done, let them know that it didn’t turn-out as well as planned, that you’re a perfectionist and have no choice but to demolish the bed and start over. Fuck-wads!
President Obama touches downs in Alaska today – his first visit to the state in office, aside from a brief and convenient fuel stop years ago. Perhaps in an attempt to foster good will before his visit, the President made official what all Alaskans have always regarded as true: the tallest mountain in our country is named “Denali,” not “McKinley.”
“Denali” translates in Athabaskan, the people native to interior Alaska, as “The Great One” – a fitting title for a 20,237 foot peak.
For over a century, the mountain has been known to outsiders as “Mount McKinley” – purely by happenstance. According to John McPhee’s account of his investigative journey across the state in the late 1970s, Coming into the Country, the story goes that a young man - fresh out of Princeton - emerged from a prospecting trip into the Alaskan wilderness in 1896 to learn that William McKinley had secured the Republican Nomination for the upcoming Presidential election. In a pledge of support, he declared the dominating peak “McKinley.” The name became official twenty years later, although McKinley himself never visited the mountain (or even the then-territory).
It’s become a commonplace of our society to historicize and therefore caricaturize the experience of rapid technological transitions. We thus interpret the relationship between our present technological culture and the movement of history by way of certain popular tropes, such as the frustrated old luddite who, left behind by the exigencies of this brave new world, shrugs and says with a measure of resignation, “I guess that’s progress.”
Opposite this image, the historical character of technology, whose most truly novel development to date lies in its accessibility, poses the image of youthful expertise: the impatient, “digitally native” Millennial brought up behind a computer screen. We tend to imagine these two complementary archetypes—the birth of the new supplanting the faded and inept—as precise coordinates of history. The experiences of a single lifetime are on this view always exceeded by the pace of things unfolding along a unilinear, progressive chronology.
Critiquing our bad habit of reifying progress would not be to downplay the real importance of historical difference, however. More than one generation alive today remembers a world in which the telephone, the cinema, and radio and television broadcasting had successively accelerated long-distance communication and media, thereby contracting great distances and transfiguring the most intimate and personal forms of contact. For a generation whose horizon of expressive and intellectual possibility once stopped with the written word, with pen on paper, print publication, and postal deliveries, the “quantum leap” of communication from the 1980s to the present, as digital and internet technology gained widespread adoption, has been in no way inconsequential.
Still, the prevailing culture of development always consolidates such differences into the temporal structure, not the content, of technological advance. Historiography, concerning that which we record and archive, doesn’t have much to say about the old, “slow” habits of communication—connecting through an operator, manually transcribing text, or waiting around for a letter to arrive—other than that they happened once upon a time and corresponded to a broader phase in the evolution of society. In their haste to chronicle change, historians zero in on the introduction of new forms, and it’s always in those precise moments of new adoption that we can sense a great qualitative loss of everyday experience—all that never gets written into history.
To instead contemplate shared history not as an inevitable progression but as collective memory, then, would mean recognizing and internalizing the vast heterogeneity of experience. It would subsist not in a conservative resistance to changing technology, which merely idealizes what came before, nor in siding with the empty promises of technological novelty, but in holding both past and future closely together.
As a result of our faith in progress, there persists in every age a tendency to speculate on what’s gained and lost over a lifetime of technical flux. If it’s at all possible to reach for a vision of progressing together as a society that doesn’t just surrender the future to technocracy or grow nostalgic at the expense of the present, it must somehow start with a sensitivity to that negative space of history, to having lived through a time period in the plurality of its technical advances and shortcomings. Then and only then, by seeing through the mendacity of loaded terms like “innovation,” can we discover a meaningful and liberating technics: an idea of technology not as something we have to keep up with, constantly buying anew, upgrading, and updating, but as knowledge that would truly work for us.
Frank Lloyd Wright left behind a thriving legacy, fed by two intertwined factors central to his identity: he was an egomaniac, and a firm believer in apprenticeship.
Convinced of his own genius, Wright willingly passed on his philosophies, as well as his aesthetic. He founded Taliesin, along with his third wife Olgivanna, in 1932, involving himself in the instruction of hundreds of students before his death in 1959. The school is now even more closely tied to the man, officially accredited as the “Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.”
Wright also founded a firm, Taliesin Associated Architects, shortly before his death. Staffed with graduates of the school, the firm’s explicit mission was to carry on his legacy. While their earliest work may have been graced by Wright’s own hand, or borrowed heavily from his unrealized designs (often relocating them by thousands of miles, in an unfortunate betrayal of their intended local sensibility), their work commissioned after his death remains blindly devoted to the forms, patterns and theories he employed.
Taliesin Associated Architects produced work until 2003. The firm was well fed by Taliesin, later the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, which boasts thousands of graduates. The combined body of work of those directly under his post-mortem influence reflect certain values inherent to Wright, such as inspiration drawn from nature, tribute paid to natural materials and organic forms, and traces of Asian influence, and is heavy with well-considered, intimate homes, low to their mid-west ground. This oeuvre begs: is Wright’s presence at the now-eponymous school overbearing? Do alumna believe their mission is to carry on his legacy, furiously producing designs they hope to be confused as originals of the master himself, or are they encouraged to develop their own identity, and leave their own mark on the landscape?
Check out a sampling of the work below, and decide for yourself:
Kaden Tower, Louisville, Kentucky, completed in 1966.
Chief Architect: William Wesley Peters of Taliesin Associates, also Wright’s step-son-in-law, and a graduate of Taliesin. Borrows from Wright’s unbuilt design for the Sarahbai Calico Mills Store in Ahmebada, India, which explains the influence of the Mughal jali.
Beaver Meadows Visitor Center, Larimer County, Colorado, completed 1967.
Taliesin Associated Architects (the first notable commission following Wright’s death).
San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, San Jose, California, completed 1972.
Chief Architect: William Wesley Peters of Taliesin Associated Architects.
The Pearl Palace, near Karaj, Iran, completed circa 1972.
Taliesin Associated Architects.
Monoma Terrace, Madison Wisconsin, completed 1997.
Design originally conceived in 1938 by Frank Lloyd Wright. Project execution and interiors (below) by Anthony Puttnam, of Taliesin Associated Architects.
Nakoma Resort Clubhouse, Plumas County, California, completed 2001.
Clubhouse design originally conceived by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1923 as the Nakoma Country Club, in Madison, Wisconsin. Design resurrected as a part of a planned living community by Taliesin Associated Architects. Residential Villas (below) designed by Taliesin-trained architects Martin Newland and Elisabeth Winnen of Newland & Winnen Design Studio.
More Recent work of Taliesin graduates:
Brittlebrush, Arizona, designed by Simón de Agüero, a recent graduate of The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.
3 Desert Way, Phoenix, designed by Trevor Pan, a recent graduate of The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.
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