the year 2015

the lost admiral

2006-11-04T09:56:00.000-05:00

what have been the goings-on of the lost admiral you may ask. this is a fine question to ponder, and sadly does not have a complete answer here to enlighten. it seems the admiral has lost his vim and vigor to provide needless content to the millions who may float by on their tide of the internet. although many interesting things have been encountered by this admiral since his last communique, he seemingly has not found it necessary to share. this may possibly change in the comming days, or.......possibly not. we shall see.

mr. "rock steady" rogers

2006-06-14T14:08:00.000-04:00

thanks to mr. hollywood's keen eye for showing us the deep rooted connection between fred rogers and the rock steady crew.......

album of the week

2006-06-06T10:33:00.000-04:00

so i saw them for the third time this past weekend at the crawfish fest in nj, and they kicked ass yet again......

The Rebirth Brass Band is a New Orleans brass band. The group was founded in 1983 by tuba player Philip Frazier, together with trumpeter Kermit Ruffins and other musicians with them at the Joseph S. Clark Sr. High School in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. Rebirth is known for combining traditional New Orleans brass band music with funk, jazz, and soul influences. Rebirth's longstanding regular Tuesday night gig at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans is one of the pillars of the New Orleans music scene, and has served as a reliable introduction to the city's nightlife for many newly arrived college students. The band regularly tours in North America and Europe, second only to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band in popularity and acclaim among the brass bands of New Orleans.

crawfish fest 2006

2006-05-31T17:14:00.000-04:00

michael arnone's seventeenth annual crawfish fest
june 3 and 4
sussex county fairgrounds
new orleans and louisiana music/food festival

genius of the week

2006-05-31T13:24:00.000-04:00

john henry bonham
5.31.48-9.25.80

Describing the style of John Bonham's drumming instantly conjurs up visions of the thunderous power he created. His contributions to rock music were revolutionary, and his talent unmatched and irreplaceable. You can only imagine Jimmy Page's reaction to first seeing him in 1968, ending his search for a new drummer to form a new band, the New Yardbirds (later renamed Led Zeppelin.)

A childhood friend of Robert Plant, they played together in the 'Band of Joy', resulting in local gigs and a few studio demos. At first, Bonham was reluctant to join the well-known guitarist because of a steady gig with Tim Rose. But... the rest of history...

As John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant have all stated many times, Led Zeppelin wouldn't have been half as good without him. Along with JPJ, they provided the solid foundation and backbone of the band, which made it all possible. Live performances truly showcased his abilities during the numerous improvised jams throughout every concert and of course his famous "Moby Dick" drum solo; reaching a half-hour in length at times! Immitators are usually left frustrated, since Bonham made it look so easy - not only in his playing but also in the incredible drum sound he acheived. His legendary right foot (on his bass pedal) and lightning-fast triplets were his instant trademark. He later refined his style from the hard skin-bashing approach to a more delicate wrist controlled one - which produced an even more powerful & louder sound with less effort.

bonham @ wikipedia

led-zeppelin.com

drummerworld

drum outtakes

senor wences

2006-05-30T16:22:00.000-04:00

Senor Wences, was a master ventriloquist who delighted "Ed Sullivan Show'' audiences with his puppet-head-in-a-box, Pedro, and his falsetto-voiced hand-puppet, Johnny.

During the Golden Age of television, the Spanish-born Wences, whose real name was Wenceslao Moreno, bickered and bantered with his puppets while he drank, smoked and juggled.

His character Pedro was a gravel-voiced head in a box, born out of necessity when Mr. Moreno's ventriloquist's dummy was accidentally damaged and only the head was spared. He created Johnny by scrunching up his fist, drawing a mouth where thumb and index finger met and draping a blond wig over the top.

Mr. Moreno would talk to his puppets with his face right in theirs, as if daring the audience to watch his lips, which, of course, never moved. He would stuff a hankie in Johnny's mouth and have the puppet speak with a muffled voice while he himself smoked a cigarette. Then he would give Johnny a drag, and the puppet -- that is, Mr. Moreno's hand -- would somehow emit perfect smoke rings. There were no jokes, just what one writer has described as "bizarre, farcical, Spanish-accented patter."

album of the week

2006-05-24T10:08:00.000-04:00

sing me back home
the new orleans social club

Six weeks after Hurricane Katrina, a group of legendary musicians from New Orleans gathered in Austin, TX, to record SING ME BACK HOME. Over seven magical days and nights, THE NEW ORLEANS SOCIAL CLUB was born. The collection features performances by members of The Neville Brothers (Ivan, Cyril and Charles), The Meters (Leo Nocentelli and George Porter, Jr.), Raymond Weber & Henry Butler. They are joined by their friends and neighbors Irma Thomas, Marcia Ball, Dr. John, Willie Tee, Troy (Trombone Shorty) Andrews, the subdudes, the Mighty Chariots of Fire, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux and John Boutté.

best of friends

2006-05-23T15:00:00.000-04:00

many thanks to mr. danomyte for informing me of this one:

best of friends: r. buckminster fuller and isamu noguchi

the noguchi museum

5.1906-10.15.06

The conceptual basis for the exhibition “Best of Friends” will be to document through text, sculptures, photographs, drawings and models the close friendship and shared values of R. Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi. Each in his own way was dedicated to improving the lot of the common man, to enhancing and encouraging the development of individual initiative and to raising his appreciation and awareness of the role of the individual in society.

genius of the week

2006-05-22T11:37:00.000-04:00

jane jacobs
5.4.16-4.25.06

Jane Jacobs, was an American-born Canadian writer and activist. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. The book has been credited with reaching beyond planning issues to influence the spirit of the times. "Jacobs came down firmly on the side of spontaneous inventiveness of individuals, as against abstract plans imposed by governments and corporations," wrote Canadian critic Robert Fulford. She was an unlikely intellectual warrior, a theorist who opposed most theories, a teacher with no teaching job and no university degree, a writer who wrote well but infrequently.

Jane Butzner was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a Jewish family in that overwhelmingly ethnic Catholic city, the daughter of a doctor and a former school teacher and nurse. After graduating from high school, she took an unpaid position as the assistant to the women's page editor at the Scranton Tribune. A year later, in the middle of the Great Depression, she left Scranton for New York City.

During her first several years in the city she held a variety of jobs, working mainly as a stenographer and freelance writer, often writing about working districts in the city. These experiences, she claims, "...gave me more of a notion of what was going on in the city and what business was like, what work was like." While working for the Office of War Information she met an architect named Robert Hyde Jacobs — her future husband.

She studied at Columbia University in the School of General Studies for two years, taking courses in geology, zoology, law, political science, and economics.

Opposing expressways and supporting neighborhoods were common themes in her life. In 1962, she was chairman of the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, when the downtown expressway plan was killed. She was again involved in stopping the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and was arrested during a demonstration on April 10, 1968. Jacobs opposed Robert Moses, who had already forced through the Cross-Bronx Expressway and other motorways against neighborhood opposition. A PBS documentary series on New York's history devoted a full hour of its fourteen-hour length strictly to the battle between Moses and Jacobs.

forward to 1992 edition of "the death and life of great american cities"

urban studies (2004 article in the new yorker)

writing on the web

studio18hundred

2006-05-16T12:19:00.000-04:00

studio18hundred
brooklyn, ny

the admiral likes very much...give them a look see.

album of the week

2006-05-12T16:42:00.000-04:00

let's start back with one that really hits:

james brown
motherlode

1. There It Is (Live)
2. She's The One
3. Since You Been Gone
4. Untitled Instrumental
5. Say It Loud (Say It Live)
6. Can I Get Some Help (Unedited)
7. You Got To Have A Mother For Me
8. Funk Bomb (Instrumental)
9. Baby Here I Come
10. People Get Up And Drive Your Funky Soul (Remix)
11. I Got Ants In My Pants (And I Want To Dance) (Remix)
12. You've Changed
13. Bodyheat (Alternate Mix)

James Brown's most groundbreaking period, 1968-72 or so, has always been a little under-appreciated and the world is still learning how important his work at that time truly was. Of course, during these years James was almost single-handedly inventing funk, with some of the most relentless and tightest bands the world has ever seen. Even the unreleased outtakes were still extremely influential to large chunks of the music world. This is a remastered reissue of a compilation that was put together in 1988, which in turn collected outtakes from the funk years. Here we can see the building blocks of all funk to come, as later musicians built entire empires on the ideas that James starts here.

mr. wilkins?

2006-05-12T15:49:00.000-04:00

much like our friend here above, i have been quite up in the air, and feeling a bit overworked as of late. many projects at once, much to do, buying a co-op, all these things which have fully distracted me from my duties to troll my various inputs and senses for ideas-adventures-ramblings-absurdity that i deem necessary to report to you. i am hoping to overcome this busy phase of my life, and return somewhat to the not so important things that i enjoy so much. let me take a look and see what may be on the way in the year 2105.......

a sighting perhaps?

2006-05-11T12:28:00.000-04:00

the admiral will be back soon....i promise!

out

2006-04-21T13:49:00.000-04:00

the admiral has been out for some time.......maybe he will rest for just a spot longer.......

married to the sea

2006-04-06T14:04:00.000-04:00

married to the sea

my most enterprising sibling...mr. hollingsworth, has noticed and brought to my attention the general lack of posting from the year 2015. yes it is true that "the man" has been keeping me under his thumb with the guise of capitalistic rewards.

today i offer you a link, supplied by mr. hollingsworth, to a most curious and entertaining site with many visual and linguistic delights, which i hope in turn shall provide me the momentum to continue to bring you the best that the year 2015 has to offer..........

photos

2006-03-31T13:06:00.000-05:00

david maisel ......i like what he sees

barbecue and the holy ghost

2006-03-24T13:01:00.000-05:00

new zion missionary baptist church
huntsville, texas

from the houston press:

The pilgrimage to the countryside in quest of barbecue is a sacred Texas ritual A never more so than when its goal is the New Zion Missionary Baptist Church on Huntsville's sleepy south side. There, outside a rickety clapboard parish hall, three hulking barbecue pits belch apocalyptic clouds of smoke, a sight as inspiring in its way as Chartres Cathedral rearing up over the fields. Tended by taciturn black gentlemen, the ribs that emerge from New Zion's well-sooted pits trigger something very like a religious experience: to gnaw on these magnificently crusty bones, awash in the incense of smoldering post oak, is to be convinced that there is a God.

Inside the low-ceilinged shed of a parish hall, deliberate church ladies cleave heroic rib racks and whack briskets asunder, bearing meat mountains to the assembled supplicants. Geoffrey Chaucer would have reveled in these long, motley tables, where families from the 'hood occupy beat-up metal folding chairs near Panama-hatted Houstonians fresh from the lake house; where a T-shirted Hispanic fellow rubs elbows with a bejeweled matron from down Conroe way; where trailer-park kicker teens feast alongside baseball-capped black youths whose napes trail slim, perfect rat-tails. A careworn, overalled man pulls up in his pickup. A woman who might be a librarian pauses at the door to deliver a shy testimonial to newcomers. For the moment, they are bound together in a single, beatific community, a microcosm of Texas as it should be.

the new york five

2006-03-22T12:37:00.000-05:00

The New York Five refers to a group of five New York City architects (Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier) who were subjects of a Museum of Modern Art exhibition organized by Arthur Drexler in 1969, and the subsequent book Five Architects in 1972.

These five had a common allegiance to a pure form of architectural modernism, harkening back to the work of Le Corbusier in the 1920s and 1930s, although on closer examination their work was far more individual. The grouping may have had more to do with social and academic allegiances, particularly the mentoring role of Philip Johnson.

The show did produce a stinging rebuke in the May 1973 issue of Architectural Forum, a group of essays called "Five on Five", written by architects Ronaldo Giurgola, Allan Greenberg, Charles Moore, Jaquelin Robertson, and Robert A. M. Stern. These five, known as the "Grays", attacked the "Whites" on the grounds that this pursuit of the pure modernist aesthetic resulted in unworkable buildings that were indifferent to site, indifferent to users, and divorced from daily life. These "Grays" were aligned with Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi and the emerging interest in vernacular architecture and early postmodernism.

John Hejduk was primarily an educator, and died in 2000. The remaining four of the New York Five have produced significantly divergent work, and disavow any continuing relationship with each other. Graves embraced postmodernism. Eisenman became the architect most associated with Deconstructivism. Meier's buildings remain truest to the modernist aesthetic and, true to Corbusian form.

peter eisenman

michael graves

charles gwathmey

john hejduk

richard meier

genius of the week

2006-03-21T13:05:00.000-05:00

curtis mayfield
6.3.42-12.26.99

Born in Chicago, Illinois, where he attended Roosevelt High School, Mayfield came to prominence as lead singer and songwriter for The Impressions, then went on to a successful solo career. Perhaps most notably, Mayfield was among the first of a new wave of mainstream African-American R&B performing artists and composers who injected social commentary into their work. This "message music" became extremely popular during the period of political ferment and social upheaval of the 1960s and '70s.

The commercial and critical peak of his solo career came with his 1972 album Superfly, the soundtrack to the blaxploitation film of the same name, and one of the most influential albums in history. Mayfield's lyrics included hard-hitting commentary on the state of affairs in black, urban ghettos at the time, previously unheard of in blaxploitation films. Bob Donat (1972), wrote in Rolling Stone that while the film's message "was diluted by schizoid cross purposes" because it "glamorizes machismo-cocaine consciousness... the anti-drug message on [Mayfield's soundtrack] is far stronger and more definite than in the film." Along with Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, this album ushered in a new socially conscious, funky style of popular soul music.

a most fantastic find

2006-03-20T17:36:00.000-05:00

polychromie architecturale

When at the height of his creative output, Le Corbusier was asked by the renowned wallpaper manufacturer Salbura to design a palette for a Le Corbuiser color collection. In fact, he designed two: the "Claviers de couleurs" in 1931, with 43 shades, and the Salbura collection in 1959 with 20. Even within these seemingly limited spectra, Le Corbusier would not confine himself: instead, he organized the different tones on sample cards so that three to five colors could be isolated or combined using a sliding band. Each of these cards (his "color keyboards") produced a different color atmosphere and a specific spatial effect. The Le Corbuiser Polychromie Architecturale, the longawaited edition of Le Corbusier's chromatic legacy, was first reprinted in 1997, quickly sold out, and is an avidly sought collector's item. Now available in a revised edition, this exquisite three-volume boxed set contains chromatically perfect samples of the wallpapers, color illustrations, sketches, and slide bands, all produced by a high-quality printing process, and then assembled and bound by hand. This extraordinary adventure into color and the creative vision of modernism's greatest architect includes texts by Le Corbusier and a scholarly introduction by editor Arthur Ruegg.

the admirals other hobby

2006-03-13T13:51:00.000-05:00

appologies to all but i have taken some time off, and have been traveling in france with the "motorcycle ball of death" team. i now look forward to the renewed energy of the spring, and a fresh sense of purpose with my posting. look for greatness in the coming days.....well at least look for some new posts.

loungin

2006-03-03T15:55:00.000-05:00

i am very worn out from my experience working on the new orleans housing competition this past week, and i find myself with nothing to say here today. so for now i will enjoy an ice cream cone with the cos and take it easy...."easy like sunday morning"

competition

2006-02-24T15:42:00.000-05:00

no posting for now...very busy working on a new orleans housing competition....see you on the other side........

amen brother

2006-02-21T17:09:00.000-05:00

i happened upon this most interesting audio/visual presentation regarding that most famous break beat from the classic "amen brother" by the winstons back in the 1960's. give it a check out:

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60's soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a 'B' side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that 'information wants to be free'- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

amen break on wikipedia
amen break and jungle
the winstons on wikipedia

The Winstons comprised of:
Richard Spencer (lead. vocals, tenor saxophone)
Ray Maritano (vocals, alto saxophone)
Quincy Mattison (vocals, lead guitar)
Phil Tolotta (second lead, organ)
Sonny Peckrol (vocals, bass guitar)
and G.C. Coleman (vocals, drums)

southern fried admiral 2 & super bad suits

2006-02-21T10:47:00.000-05:00

and here are some more visual delights:

now this brings me to my most fovorite find in charleston. i happened upon a fine establishment named super bad "the king of fashions" where a man of fine taste could find "new york styles for men and boys". needless to say, i purchased 20 suits. let me tell you friends there are no fashions of this kind in new york......