2004.05.15 07:56
Re: Papers of the HTAFCC
ghost written papers is a more accurate description.
2004.05.17 11:01
Re: Papers of the HTAFCC
Otto is indeed the key of "my Rita Novel idea." He is such an unknown.
I watched Vanilla Sky for the first time last night. I saw an interesting blurring of the real and the virtual.
My brother Otto was in a drug induced coma for about two weeks after his lobotomy 20 March 1980 (my 24th birthday). It took about nine months after that for the schizophrenia to come back.
Otto, the great virtual King of Bavaria, was a very tortured soul. His body was his real cage.
My brother Otto said some strange (and obviously memorable) things to me when he was at Friends Hospital for the first time back in 1976.
In 1971, soon after Otto got his first car (a VW Beetle), he took me to 'Stokesbury Mansion' (sic). He knew I really liked architecture, and he too knew good architecture when he saw it. Otto and I made many trips to Whitemarsh Hall. In fact, he was the one that helped me rip off some of the marble wall paneling that enveloped Mr. Stotesbury's bathroom. [One panel now has Anonymous Saint In Bikini While Jesus Is Walking On Water (1983) painted on it.] I have some old Super-8 movie film with Otto walking on the parapets of Whitemarsh Hall, a scene remarkably similar to Charles and Sebastian walking on the roof of Castle Howard in Brideshead Revisited.
Edward Townsend Stotesbury suddenly died in the grand foyer of Whitemarsh Hall 66 years ago [not] yesterday [but on 21 May]. You could say that was the beginning of the end of 'the Versailles of America.'
2004.05.17 12:03
El Mirasol, etc.
Eva Stotesbury died 31 May 1948 at El Mirasol, the E.T. Stotesbury residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
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21 May 1502 -- the discovery of St. Helena Island
21 May 1938 -- the the death of Edward T. Stotesbury
30 May 1640 -- the death of Pieter Pauwel Rubens
31 May 1951 -- the death of Cardinal Dennis Dougherty
Not too long ago, I noticed that Ned and Eva Stotesbury were married 18 January 1912, i.e., King of Prussia Day.
Q: What does El Mirasol mean?
A: Sunflower
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2004.05.17 12:26
amost El Mirasol, generous Eva, and it's only a movie
In 1935, while in India on her honeymoon with James Cromwell, Doris Duke commissioned a bedroom and bathroom suite based on designs seen at the Taj Mahal and other examples of Mughal architecture. She intended to install her marble suite in El Mirasol, the mansion owned by the Stotesbury family in Palm Beach, Florida.
--www.shangrilahawaii.org
These massive lions were a gift from Eva Stotesbury, Miss Duke's mother-in-law. In 1935, Doris Duke married James Cromwell and they immediately embarked on an around-the-world honeymoon. They explored the Middle East, India, China and traveled throughout Southeast Asia -- and these travels had an enormous impact on Doris Duke's taste and collections.
--www.christies.com
As the traditional obnoxious brat, a little boy, Mickey Bennett, played Ray Dooley's part in the picnic sequence of the film, It's the Old Army Game (1926). It was shot on the front lawn of the most lavish estate in Palm Beach, El Mirasol, the winter home of a J. P. Morgan partner, Edward Stotesbury. Not only was it the most improbable spot for a [W.C.] Fields picnic, but what the production unit did to the lawn was frightful. During the five days of shooting the litter converted it to a garbage dump; and when the trucks and forty pairs of feet finished their work it looked like the abandoned site of an old soldiers' reunion. But Mr. and Mrs. Stotesbury were thrilled. 'Everybody,' said Mrs. Stotesbury, 'everybody in Palm Beach is driving by to see what is going on here!' I was not in the sequence so she invited me to tea inside the villa. After I autographed a photograph for her young granddaughter whose name was also Louise Brooks, Mr. Stotesbury, a teetery but spry little man of seventy-seven, dressed in the costume of an 18th-century dandy, took me up to his library where he entertained me with a short concert on the drums.
--www.psykickgirl.com
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2004.05.18 10:26
REPORTAGE- Rhythm & Gender
I like the zip... list above. like chapters, like lessons, like evolutionary stages, like different floors of a building I'd love to design, like a row of restaurants while you're perpetually hungry.
Le Corbusier is very high on my list. Go to Harvard's Loeb Library to see my analysis of his unexecuted Palais des Congres—they were the only one's that purchased both the slides and drawings I published in 1991.
Early Mies still intrigues.
Gropius never really inspired me at all.
What I find historically interesting is a comparison and contrast of Freud's first visit to Rome (gen Italia) and Le Corbusier's first visit to the Arcopolis.
I'm not sure the Roman's ever built in the Doric order. Composite was indeed their order of choice.
Seutonius relates how a delegtion from India came to Rome during the reign of Augustus. This makes me really wonder why the Great Stupa in India (c. 1st cent. BC) and the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome (also 1st cent. BC) are virtually identical in size and design.
Why do you think Piranesi first deliniated all the circuses of the first printing of the Ichnographia Campus Martius in a stylized manner, and then (unnoticed for over 200 years) changed all the circuses into copies of the Circus of Maxentius in the second printing of the Ichnographia Campus Martius? Piranesi sure knew how to paint a quaestio abstrusa!
You know how Eutropia confessed that (her son) Maxentius was a bastard soon after Maxentius died in battle against Constantine, well, I hear Eutropia recently made another confession as to how Maxentius' real father was Diocletian. Ain't that a hoot?!?
2004.05.19 12:29
REPORTAGE- Rhythm & Gender
Ever since Otto's death 11 October 1916, he kept close watch of what Einstein was doing—once a Münchener always a Münchener and all that. Otto and Einstein first met 18 April 1955, and are close friends since then. Einstein doesn't hang around Earth much these days though; he's mostly far off somewhere in the continuum. The last time Otto and Einstein were together was on 5 March 2000 at Princeton. They captured lots of images (of architecture) on the University campus that Sunday. Otto recently decided to publish the images—Art that is Otto and Einstein at Princeton 5 March 2000.
2004.05.19
museumpeace/vegas/knocking
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2004.05.19 15:43
REPORTAGE- Rhythm & Gender
Einstein's visage is not exactly a work by Einstein himself, but Einstein's work/writings are indeed physical evidence that Einstein was well trained, that he was a professional scientist, and that he well understood design and its execution.
Otto loves teasing Einstein about God's fondness for casino architecture.
2004.05.19 18:43
Re: larry rivers
After hearing Terry Gross interview Larry Rivers back in 1992, I read What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography. I remember liking the book, but these days I don't remember much else except that Rivers related how some woman at some beach house they were both staying at showed him how to use an eggshell to get the tiny bits of eggshell that sometimes get into the eggwhites. Ever since then every time I make eggs for breakfast I automatically think of Larry Rivers.
Rivers was most recently in Philadelphia painting The Greatest Homosexual Couple, a painting of Napoleon and Jim Williams.
2004.05.21 10:11
REPORTAGE- Rhythm & Gender
My father first saw my mother acting on stage within the confines a Soviet/Stalinist Labor Camp sometime in the latter years of 1945-49.
reenacting Rosa's Lauf
Maybe only five degrees of separation between me and Stalin?
I still remember how, when I was two years old (1958), my mother taught me bricolage, i.e., how to make toys out of fittings from a box that originally displayed a variety items from Old Spice.
There was a whole lot of (almost unbelievable) stuff I learned growing up in my house.
At this point in my life, I have virtually no respect for academics.
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