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Sohei Nishino walked the city of London on foot for a month, wandering the streets and recording images from every possible angle. About 4,000 of these photographs, hand printed in his own dark room, were meticulously pieced together with scissors and glue in his Tokyo studio. The result was an aerial view of London, which was reshot as a completed collage to produce a final image. More of Nishino’s collages are on show at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London
Month: March 2011
Virgin Hotel Possibility for Chicago
Looks like Branson’s first choice, the Chicago Motor Club building, might be off the table.
With his U.S. airline getting ready to fly into Chicago, Sir Richard Branson wants a hotel to go with it.
New York-based Virgin Hotels, the British billionaire’s upstart chain, has been scouting downtown for a location, recently breaking off talks to build a 189-room hotel in a vacant Art Deco building in the East Loop.
The venture, which plans to invest about $500 million in four-star hotels over the next few years, is Mr. Branson’s latest effort to subvert an established industry with his iconic brand, which has been slapped on everything from record stores to spaceships.
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Virgin entered into talks last year with a venture led by local investor Sam Roti that owns the empty 17-story tower, court records show. In a December letter to Mr. Roti, Virgin said it was considering investing as much as $10 million in a $74-million project, including the construction of a new tower next door.
The Motor Club property is tied up in a dispute between Mr. Roti and one of the property’s lenders, Chicago-based Aries Capital LLC, which won a judgment of foreclosure in September. A few weeks later, Mr. Roti sought to thwart Aries’ foreclosure by seeking Chapter 11 protection for the Motor Club venture.
Virgin ended talks with Mr. Roti in early February, according to court documents, which don’t cite a reason.
(click here to continue reading Richard Branson’s Virgin Hotels looks to open in Chicago)
Built in 1928 to be the home of the motor club, the distinctive structure was designed by Chicago architects Holabird & Root, who also built the Chicago Board of Trade and the Palmolive Building. The lobby features a mural map showing 19 major auto routes across the country by John W. Norton, who also painted a mural of Ceres, the Roman goddess of the harvest, in the Chicago Board of Trade Building, 141 W. Jackson Blvd.
(click here to continue reading Foreclosure suit hits Motor Club building | News | Crain’s Chicago Business.)
Too bad, that is an attractive building, imo. If I have the right building. For some reason, I thought this was called the Jeweler’s Building. Unfortunately, my Chicago architecture book is at my other office. Doh!
Texas Education and Its Enemy – the GOP
Rick Perry and his fellow GOP-ers are busily ensuring that Texas remains at the bottom of most education metrics for a long while. I guess their philosophy is to turn Texas into a third world country, and depress wages, thus ensuring the Texas oligarchy healthy profits when Texas secedes from the US.
Paul Krugman writes:
Texas likes to portray itself as a model of small government, and indeed it is. Taxes are low, at least if you’re in the upper part of the income distribution (taxes on the bottom 40 percent of the population are actually above the national average). Government spending is also low. And to be fair, low taxes may be one reason for the state’s rapid population growth, although low housing prices are surely much more important.
But here’s the thing: While low spending may sound good in the abstract, what it amounts to in practice is low spending on children, who account directly or indirectly for a large part of government outlays at the state and local level.
And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.
But wait — how can graduation rates be so low when Texas had that education miracle back when former President Bush was governor? Well, a couple of years into his presidency the truth about that miracle came out: Texas school administrators achieved low reported dropout rates the old-fashioned way — they, ahem, got the numbers wrong.
It’s not a pretty picture; compassion aside, you have to wonder — and many business people in Texas do — how the state can prosper in the long run with a future work force blighted by childhood poverty, poor health and lack of education.
But things are about to get much worse.
(click here to continue reading Texas, Budget Cuts and Children – NYTimes.com.)
and concludes, in case you missed his point:
The really striking thing about all this isn’t the cruelty — at this point you expect that — but the shortsightedness. What’s supposed to happen when today’s neglected children become tomorrow’s work force?
Anyway, the next time some self-proclaimed deficit hawk tells you how much he worries about the debt we’re leaving our children, remember what’s happening in Texas, a state whose slogan right now might as well be “Lose the future.”
links for 2011-03-06
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Only the staunchest Apple haters and self-deluded "openness" ideologues are going to pony up that kind of dough for a tablet that can't offer a comparable experience and doesn't have better tech specs. The Xoom doesn't even have the advantage of working with a carrier that Apple's tablet doesn't. In seven days, there will be both native CDMA and GSM models of the iPad 2.
Think about this: yesterday when I checked, the Android Marketplace had sixteen Honeycomb tablet-resolution apps. Sixteen. And you know what's not included in that sixteen? That space game that they show the guy playing in the Xoom commercials. In other words, they had to put a fake game in the commercial. Would they have done that if they had even one compelling application that could make the Xoom look better than the iPad?
The Fading Sounds of Analog Technology
Ah, the sounds of my youth. Vinyl record scratches, dial tones, busy signals, typewriter keys clacking, modems squawking even. I’m with David Pogue, and will miss these sounds as they join previously vanished sounds, horses clomping on cobblestone streets, ship masts creaking, and steam rail engines.
Then there’s the record-scratch sound, still used frequently in ads and comic scenes to indicate someone’s train of thought going off the rails. Isn’t it weird that we still use that sound? For the most part, the last 20 years’ worth of viewers and listeners have never even heard that sound in real life! (In a 2008 NPR segment, the host asked some teenagers if they could identify the sound. They couldn’t. “I have no idea…. I know I saw it on TV.”)
And then there’s the rewind/fast-forward gibberish sounds — of TAPE. What will they do in the movies, now that random-access digital video formats deprive producers of that audience-cueing sound?
What about modem-dialing shrieks? Sure, we’re all thrilled to have always-on Internet connections. But wasn’t there something satisfying, something understandable, about that staticky call-and-response from our computers to the mothership?
We’re losing the dial tone, too. Cellphones don’t have dial tones. Only landlines do, and those are rapidly disappearing. And without the dial tone, how will movie producers ever indicate that someone’s hung up on a character? (Even though that was an unrealistic depiction to begin with.)
Funny thing is, we’re replacing these sounds mainly with… nothing! What’s the sound of broadband? Of rewinding a CD?
(click here to continue reading The Fading Sounds of Analog Technology -David Pogue – NYTimes.com.)
Artists and Payoffs
Justin Moyer tries to point the finger at artists who play for “undesirables”
Paul Robeson penned a tribute to Stalin. Bob Marley played for Robert Mugabe. And Paul Simon and Queen performed in apartheid-era South Africa. Chart-topping musicians don’t just win Grammys and score endorsement deals – they get paid mega-bucks to perform in unsavory places for unsavory people. Usually no one pays attention.
But not last week. When the big paydays that R&B stars got from the Gaddafi family became public, critics lashed out faster than Naomi Campbell denying taking blood diamonds.
(click here to continue reading Beyonce and Mariah Carey sang for the Gaddafis. Now they’re changing their tune..)
Well, except all of the examples Justin Moyers cites were big deals. I had heard of all of them, and so did you too in all probability. Not to mention that these incidents took place in the quaint era before internet gossip rags, and before the 24 hour cable news networks set the agenda.
Let’s peek at how big of a deal, via the magic of Google.
- Paul Robeson and Stalin yields: about 149,000 hits
- Bob Marley and Robert Mugabe: about 47,000 hits
- Paul Simon in apartheid-era South Africa: about 382,000 hits
- Queen Plays in South Africa: about 15,600,000 hits, some1 of which are about the performing artists who performed as Queen.
So, on to the bigger point: should we criticize the artists who took money from dictators, and bankers, and other undesirables? Or the Medicis, or Bill Gates? Even if the artists are already wealthy, like Beyonce, Usher, Mariah Carey, Nelly Furtado, Lionel Richie, 50 Cent? I don’t like the music of any of these pop stars who took Libyan blood-for-oil dollars, but that isn’t relevant. Unless the National Endowment of the Arts suddenly becomes a pet project of the G.O.P.2, artists should be able to get paid without sniping from the chattering classes.
Footnotes:Epic Burger in West Loop
Actually looking forward to trying this place.
An all-natural hamburger chain plans to open its third restaurant in the West Loop, part of an expansion that could bring 10 new locations to Chicago over the next two years.
Epic Burger, whose tagline promises “a more mindful burger,” signed a lease at 550 W. Adams St. for what is to be its largest outpost to date, at about 3,300 square feet. Founder and CEO David Friedman says he aims to open the restaurant in June or July.
Chicago-based Epic Burger debuted in May 2008 at 517 S. State St. in the South Loop with a menu that shuns processed cheeses and yellow mustard and champions fresh beef, eggs from cage-free chickens and locally grown produce. A Lincoln Park restaurant followed last June, at 1000 W. North Ave. The organic, fast-casual concept sprang from a road trip that left Mr. Friedman craving a better alternative to the standard burger joints.
(click here to continue reading Natural burger chain picks third location | News | Crain’s Chicago Business.)
Epic Burger says it provides “a better burger experience,” offering all-natural beef with an assortment of environmentally friendly toppings — cage-free organic eggs, nitrate-free bacon and all-natural Wisconsin cheeses.
Supporting Technology
Afternoon Sun On Lincoln
Lincoln’s low cost auto insurance, that is.
No area code, so this sign is at least older than 1989.
Continue to archive-dive, this photo is circa summer, 2006. I’ve taken others of this same billboard, but like how the light fell here.