Burnin’

“I have no money with which to build the modern American campus, but if you’ll design the buildings, I’ll work night and day to raise the means.” -Dr. Ludd Spivey, President of Florida Southern College, appealing to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1938

Lakeland, Florida is an old school Florida town with lovely lakes, a vital downtown core and a private college with the largest single collection of Frank Lloyd Wright designed buildings anywhere in the world.

inside Annie Pfeiffer Chapel at Florida Southern

We arrived on campus the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving which meant that the visitor center was closed. However, the walking tour was all the more pleasant without students or crowds of any sort to distract from the main show. And what a show! FLW went all out in Lakeland and I kept thinking as we wandered around the former orange grove how nice it would be to spend four years on this campus, or longer if one were a faculty member or administrator.

Florida Southern is a private liberal arts school. They don’t have an architecture program. However, the school would do well to start one, or better yet a program in achitectural preservation and restoration. Given that many of the buildings were built in part by students working in return for tuition and board, there would something poetic about a new group of students engaged in preservation of this national treaure.

For more images from the campus, see my Flickr set.

Caffe Vittoria, Hanover St., Boston

My friend Mark asked me earlier today where I’d like to go to dinner. I said, I don’t know. How about something exotic? Something I can’t get where I live.

Mark delivered. Big time. He and his wife Sharon swooped over to Cambridge to get me and over the bridge to Bahstin we went in their Honda Accord. We parked downtown, then walked about six blocks to the North End, a neighborhood with no parking but an Italian restaurant every 20 feet. We dined at The Florentine, which was totally satisfying, but our dessert was the bomb.

After a port at The Florentine for Sharon and me and a single malt for Mark, we walked back down Hanover Street to Caffe Vittoria and it–like every other place–was packed. However, we were seated quickly, and the next thing I knew I was enjoying pistachio gelati and espresso while realizing that there is no place like this anywhere near where I live. It was nice to feel the Saturday night energy and experience the history of the place. And it was good to share the company of a friend I have not seen in nearly two decades (although it seems like just yesterday).

Place is one of the central themes in my life. The importance it holds for me is not normal. So it makes sense that the last few books I’ve cracked–A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut and Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck–are about place and thus about culture.

image courtesy of Flickr user, Rob Walker

Rob Walker’s Letters from New Orleans is a wonderful narrative like the aforementioned titles, concerned like I am, with place. And any visitor to, or resident of, New Orleans will tell you, the Crescent City is quite a place.

Walker, who writes the “Consumed” column in the The New York Times Magazine, started by sending the stories in this volume as emails to friends. He covers a wide swath of material in this book—”the projects,” Carnival, high society, race, music, parades, food and more. One story I particulary like is called “3% Theory.” In it, Walker introduces the reader to performance artist Kal Spelletich. He first encountered Spelletich while a student at U of T in Austin. Given that Spelletich had come to Austin from Iowa, Walker asked if he wasn’t relieved to be in a more diverse place like Austin. Spelletich responed, “There’s always a fringe element. You could go to Waco, Texas, and 3 percent of the people are going to be these experiemental artists.”

Walker tells two tales about legendary New Orleans’ restaurant Galatoire’s. It’s funny stuff. He has a journalist’s eye for detail and nails the crusty oldtimers, drinking heavily and flirting over five-hour Friday luncheons.

It’s clear that Walker’s love for New Orleans is the real deal. I’ve only been there during Jazz Fast–yes five of them–but I know enough to know how important the culture of this most un-American of American cities is to the nation, to my friends and to me personally. Letters deepens the mystery whist revealing it (no easy task).

As a South Carolina resident and periodic voter, I’m sorely disappointed that I will not be able to cast a vote for Charleston native Steven Colbert in the upcoming Democratic primary.

According to MTV, the executive committee of the South Carolina Democratic Party shot the funny man down on November 1, despite the fact Colbert paid the $2,500 filing fee necessary to get into the race.

Colbert’s bid was voted down 13-3. Using random criteria such as whether the candidate was recognized in the national news media as a legitimate candidate and whether he’d actively campaigned in the state, the committee put the kibosh on the Colbert bid.

One of those who voted in favor of certifying Colbert was South Carolina Representative and social-work administrator Gilda Cobb-Hunter. She said having Colbert on the ballot would be a good way to bring a national spotlight on issues of concern to the Palmetto state. “Also, quite frankly, I think we — and I mean elected officials and party officials — take ourselves a bit too seriously and I think an injection of humor would have added to the process.”

According to Wonkette, one of the humorless ones is Waring Howe, who said, “Over my dead body will Colbert’s name be on the ballot.”

A recent poll of likely 2008 voters showed that in his short time in the running, Colbert was coming in at 2.3 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, which put him in fifth place above Governor Bill Richardson (2.1 percent), Congressman Dennis Kucinich (2.1 percent) and former Senator Mike Gravel (less than 1 percent).

Colbert said on his show recently, “ABC News says my campaign is ‘no joke.’ I ask you, is anyone saying that about Richardson or Biden?”

“A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.” -Guy Fawkes

According to Reveries, U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, from the 14th district in Texas, raised more than $4 million dollars on Monday to help fund his run for President.

Ron Paul pulled off his fundraising coup by setting up a special web site called ThisNovember5th.com — a reference to Guy Fawkes Day. On the off chance you’ve never heard of Guy Fawkes, he’s “the Roman Catholic, anti-Protestant rebel who on Nov. 5, 1605, tried to assassinate King James I by blowing up the Parliament.”

Ron Paul is careful to note that he is not an advocate of assassination or of “blowing up government buildings.” However, he and his supporters apparently view Guy Fawkes as a metaphor for the kind of patriotism they deem lacking in present-day America. As Ron Paul explains in a ten-minute video posted at ThisNovember5th: “The true patriot challenges the state when the state embarks on enhancing its power at the expense of the individual … The American Republic is in remnant status … The stage is set for our country eventually devolving into a military dictatorship, and few seem to care.”

I prefer the radical concepts forwarded by U.S. Congressmen from Ohio, Dennis Kucinich–like his call for the establishment of a Department of Peace–but Ron Paul’s libertarian message is also appealing. Although, I’m somewhat surprised at his choice of historical figures to hold up as an example. We desperately need to remove the problems, and the people who create them, from our government, but not with violence. I understand that violence would be necessary should we ever “devolve into a military dictatorship,” but we’re not there yet.

“To keep going our present ideal of an industrial plutocracy we must continue to have war. We have to keep scaring the sheep. A politician today is that man among men who can scare them the worst and huddle them the fastest and the most, managing that way to get almost anything out of them.” -Frank Lloyd Wright in a speech given May 20, 1949 in Biloxi, MS

I periodically like to review the nation’s military history. To do the same, here’s a list of our wars and conflicts. It’s a lonnnnnnggggg list, and growing longer by the day.

People say we need to remove the money from politics. While that’s true, it seems more accurate to say we need to remove the profit from war. If we could manage that, many of our domestic ills could then be addressed. But the reality is we won’t manage it without a complete realignment of our priorities, and the structures that support them.

We like to believe our own rhetoric and refer to ourselves the greatest nation on earth. We’re not. We’re but the latest incarnation of imperial greed, bound to fail as Britian, France, Spain and ancient Rome failed. Imperialism is not a sustainable practice. The aftermath of our pending failure in this endeavor could mean utter darkness, or it could mean a new enlightenment.

People also talk about how we’re in the midst of an internal culture war (and have been for decades). That’s correct. And this internal battle is for our collective soul; therefore, its outcome is imperative to our future as a nation. I believe most Americans are good people, but we’re also an easily confused people with little sense of our own history. To stop the confusion, we need to shut off the TV and read. It may not sound like fun, but knowledge is freedom.

If you’d like to take my word for it and crack an important book, I can think of none better than Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Every concerned American can benefit greatly from this book, as it details in plain English what this country is all about.

“We are beginning to learn that the highest and finest kind of morality is beauty.” -Frank Lloyd Wright, Oct. 25, 1951 at Florida Southern College

Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of a spectacular “water dome” at the heart of one of his most ambitious projects was finally realized on October 24th (70 years after he designed it), when Florida Southern College turned on 74 high-pressure jets that create a graceful 45-foot-high dome of illuminated droplets above a basin 160 feet in diameter.

The water dome was a central feature of Wright’s design for the college. But the pumps available at the time proved significantly less powerful than Wright’s imagination, and the fountain was eventually divided in three smaller pools with walkways between them.

The college is in the midst of several projects aimed at restoring its Wright-designed structures, including the fountain, the larger of two chapels, and Wright’s striking esplanades — cantilevered walkways that connect his buildings. The effort to recreate the water dome as Wright envisioned it cost nearly $1-million. The college will need close to $50 million to complete all the Wright restoration it has slated.

[via The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Ledger and NPR]

Yemassee—Hundreds of sightseers got an eyeful on this crisp November weekend, as history and architecture buffs from as far away as Virginia and Florida made their way to the rural northwest corner of Beaufort County. The reason for their journey? Auldbrass, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterworks and his only project in the Lowcountry.

see my entire Auldbrass Flickr set

Wright started work on Auldbrass in 1939 and continued to improve the project until his death in 1959. The plantation–as all such properties are known in these parts–was commissioned by an industrial engineer from Michigan, C. Leigh Stevens. After Stevens’ passing, his daughter lived on and maintained the property for 20 years, before selling it to a group who used it as a hunting lodge.

Modern day Auldbrass began in 1986 when Joel Silver, the famous (and rich) Hollywood producer came on the scene. Silver hired Eric Lloyd Wright, the legend’s grandson, to help restore the place to its original magnificence. The pair had previously joinded forces to restore Wright’s “Storer House” in Los Angeles.

Thanks to Silver’s generosity, the public is invited to see the property once every two years. The showing is coordinated by Beaufort County Open Land Trust.

Richard Ziade at Basement.org points to a message board post about file-sharing from Will Sheff, the front man for the rock band Okkervil River.

My real concerns with file-sharing are primarily aesthetic.

There’s a story by Jorge Luís Borges called “The Library of Babel.” It describes a fantastical library composed of an apparently infinite number of identical rooms. Each room contains 1,050 books. Printed on the pages are words whose lettering and order are apparently random. Because the library is complete, among the gibberish it also contains every book that is possible, every book that could ever be written. It also contains every imaginable variation of every book possible, whether that variation is off by thousands of letters or by a single comma. Borges adds that it must contain, somewhere, a book that explains the meaning and origin of the library itself – just as it contains thousands of variations of that book, true and false. He writes, “When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure…As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression.”

The Internet – with its glut not only of information but of misinformation, and of information that is only slightly correct, or only slightly incorrect – fills me with this same weird mixture of happiness and depression. I sometimes feel drowned in information, deadened by it. How many hundreds of bored hours have you spent mechanically poring through web pages not knowing what you’re looking for, or knowing what you’re looking for but not feeling satisfied when you find it? You hunger but you’re not filled. Everything is freely available on the Internet, and is accordingly made inestimably valuable and utterly value-less.

Damn, a rock star made from brains. Who knew?

According to Wikipedia, Sheff was an English major at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota (which explains a lot).

To read more of his writings, visit this Jound.com page.