Dylan > Recent Status Updates

Am I not driven from the presence of God and the region of paradise, and sent to wander amid world of barrenness and curse for ever and ever?

Anthony Bourdain saying that he likes John Coltrane’s version of Favorite Things made me gasp in surprise. It’s safe to say that me and Anthony are twinnem frfr.

"Grew" is misspelled as "Gew" so I have a first edition of this book you fucks.

Drawing of Le Corbusier's Radiant City. Could be a neat tattoo idea.

Long Lines Building photo.

A treatise on blank walls and how megastructures without sufficient architectural flourishes deaden pedestrian spaces.

"A 'stimulus' can be a physical object or sight. At the small park at the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, there is a spectacular view of the towers of lower Manhattan across the East River. It is a great conversation opener and strangers often remark on it to each other. When you come upon such a scene it would be rude not to."

"stimulus" in this case is an external linkage between people that prompts bonding.

Percent for Arts program, where 1 1/2 percent of the capital cost of a government project has to be devoted towards public art.

[Of Union Square Farmers Market} "The kind of food some people find most compelling is right off the farm... inviting [pedestrians] to touch and squeeze and sniff. The activity is also very sociable. There is a direct line from grower to consumer ... This means more things to talk about, to query, and most of the farmers talk knowledgeably and well."

Fredrick Law Olmstead spoke of an "interior" park and an "exterior" one; the "exterior" should be enjoyable from the street by providing a scenic beauty and inviting pedestrians into the "interior" of the park.

Whyte's famous bit about moveable chairs and the pedestrian's relationship to ownership of space.

Here White is writing about "Dope Dealers, Whores, and Pimps" and how he used street observations to identify a veritable pimp dressed in ermine pink furs and rolling in a Cadillac.

"Music under New York" program is run by the MTA to allow musicians to play in their subway stations (for free) without being ticketed by transit police. This program was piloted to make riders *believe* that transit service was getting better.

A week after the opening ceremony on Memorial Day, someone shouted that the bridge was falling and 12 people were trampled to death.

For a great drawing of this event:
"Aftermath of the panic on the bridge, Memorial Day, 1883" Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper

Hewitt's address expressed sympathies for the plight of the working class but cautioned against the spread of political ideologies such as Marxism but championed progress towards labor unions. Hewitt's address was there to implicate the BK bridge as the sole production of the working class. He stated the BK bridge worker wages, $2.50 a day, as to the slave wages for the pyramids of Giza, 2 cents, was progress.

When BK Bridge was opened, very little was said about its utility, but rather ceremonial orators highlighted America's ability to "get things done".

"Moreover, by selling its vast municipal lands in the middle of the 19th century, NY had surrounded its power of self-determination, and turned its destiny over to real-estate operators, to "developers" who measure inches of land in thousands of dollars. Property values prevailed over community values, and "utility" was defined by standards of commerce."

"The confusion surrounding BK Bridge revealed a serious crisis in urban society. One of the causes was the subordination of the American city to state legislatures: not New York and BK, but Albany granted the authority to build the bridge. (Seth Low, "An American View of Municipal Government") "

Montgomery Schuyler, an architecture student, criticized the BK Bridge for being a thin marriage of Neo-gothic towers and an explicitly engineered deck that did little to heighten or complement the architectural ornamentation. Schuyler indicted the architects of the contemporary era by noting that engineers were convincingly able to replicate the works of the old masters.

- essay "Brooklyn Bridge as a Monument"

On Brooklyn Bridge. Oil by Albert Gleizes 1917

Abstract painting capturing the geometric and chaotic energy of the bridge.

People were concerned that the increased transit across the BK Bridge would inflate property values in Brooklyn. (1883 btw).

"The bridge would introduce Brooklyn to the amenities ion high culture, and high rents." (pg 113)

BK Bridge was a blend of classical Gothic motifs and advanced architecture that Roebling believed once completed would shift the economic dominance of the world away from Europe to North America by serving as the final link for the Pacific Union railroad; where East meets West. Roebling designed the bridge in the gothic style as its arches are "one of the traditional emblems of man's aspiration for the divine".

"Whoever discover disharmonies of nature, without being able to reconcile them, will discover that the idea of disharmony originated in his own mind, and was only reflected in that which surrounds him. Whatever you wish to perceive you can see ... Here is your Heaven and your Hell, near enough and without any further search far off." John Roebling, architect of the Brooklyn Bridge

"It is significant that [Thomas] Pope did not design his bridge to fit any specific place; it was an invention in the broadest sense, a contrivance to be used wherever a bridge was needed ... Pope's invention represented the "free-born soul" which "breaks the rude and barbarous chains" of academic tradition; it represented America itself."

If one had habitually breathed the New York air there were times when anything less crystalline seemed stifling.

"Whether by design or not, the ultimate effect of Moses' transportation policies would be to help keep the city's poor trapped in their slums."

Meat Ax quote

Cross-Bronx expressway engineering - complete madness!

[Toussaint L’ouverture] “If Bonaparte is the first man in France, Toussaint is the first man in the Archipelago of the Antilles.”

Thoughts + Feelings: I preferred the beginning where C.L.R. James took a very authoritative stance on denouncing France's torture of slaves and the bravery of the Haitian peoples on defending against the multinational interest in "quelling the rebellion". As the fires died down, the writing becomes a melange of geopolitical drama and dialogue between revolutionary idols, which is less enthralling.