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General Motors Technical Center
The General Motors Technical Center was conceptualized by General Motors' Chairman of the Board of Directors, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. The existing General Motors facilities, which were located throughout Detroit, were outdated, and growth and activities of the company surpassed the capacity of the existing space. Sloan and the General Motors executives agreed that it was necessary to create a new space that could bring together all of the GM staff working at different locations in order to further the work of the highly specialized GM scientists, engineers, designers, and technicians" (National Register of Historic Places Report). In March 1944, Sloan approached the General Motors Research Vice President, Charles Kettering, with the idea of relocating the entire General Motors staff outside of Detroit, and creating a space large enough to accommodate the needs of the corporation's activities. On December 13, 1944, Sloan received support from GM's Board. Only a few weeks later, a 326-acre site of farmland was chosen in Warren, Michigan, twelve miles north of Detroit.
Vice President of GM Styling, Harley Earl, insisted that the new General Motors Technical Center not only create the facilities necessary for a world-class corporation, but also, it must exude the visual identity of one as well. While some on the Board, including Charles Kettering, thought that the Technical Center should be a purely functional, utilitarian expression designed by a local architect with experience in building large industrial complexes, such as Albert Kahn. Earl won out and selected the internationally renowned firm Saarinen and Swanson.
Saarinen and Swanson, in conjunction with landscape architect Thomas Church, designed a modern complex composed of a central, seven-acre irregular-shaped laek with five groups of connected buildings surrounding it at an estimated $20 million. GM was impressed with the design and gave the commission to Saarinen and Swanson on September 19, 1945. At the time of its groundbreaking on October 23, 1945, it was considered by Architectural Forum to be the largest project in the United States.
Post World War II, consumer demand for automobiles drastically increased, and General Motors needed to use funds for the Technical Center to meet the demands of the consumer, thus terminating construction of the center. In 1948, when they resumed plans for the construction of the Technical Center, their needs had grown: the facility would now cost $60 million (and would end up costing $100 million at its completion). Saarinen and Swanson had changed names to Saarinen, Saarinen and Associates, and the firm had entered another contract with GM on December 3, 1948 (as did Thomas Church). Eero Saarinen led the project, and his designs included some 1945 features, but instead of connected buildings, there instead would be six main facilities that would be nearly uniform and outfitted similarly: steel, aluminum, and glass curtain walls, with colored glazed brick end walls. They were also planned around a large lake. The six main buildings included: a ten-story office building; four buildings to house GM staff; and a Service Section building to maintain the center. Each complex was composed of wings according to their function, and usually attached to the main building by glass enclosed corridors or pedestrian skybridges. The office tower was ultimately edited out of the design to save money.
The interiors of nearly all of the buildings were designed as flexible interior spaces to accommodate changing office and technical needs. This was achieved by avoiding the use of interior columns. Saarinen explicitly wanted to create buildings that would not have to be significantly altered so to "avoid usual slum-like appearance of factory buildings." Saarinen also incorporated the machinery into the interior space, even considering the color of the machines when planning the interior.
The landscape design of the Technical Center significantly changed in the redesign, evident in its high-style modernist arrangement of shapes. In 1950, there was already a need to expand the current plan, and GM purchased more land, bringing its land ownership from 326 acres in 1944 to 813 acres in 1954. Saarinen was a consultant on plans for new buildings on the new property; the largest expansion was to occur on the east side of railroad tracks the divided the original planned center and the expanded center. The east side plan included five new building, the complex to be named the Chevrolet-Fisher Body Engineering Center: engineering facilities for Chevrolet and Fisher Body; an office tower (similar to Saarinen's original plan); and a restaurant (similar to Saarinen's Central Restaurant). Saarinen had wanted to play a larger role in designing these structures, but some GM executives thought his construction methods had previously been too costly, and his predilection towards more human scaled industrial buildings would not serve the growing needs of the complex.
While the General Motors Technical Center today is recognized as a singular, unified campus, it can also be understood as having an original plan, which was expanded by numerous later additions. The original master plan of the campus, designed by Eero Saarinen with landscape architect Thomas Church, was 320 acres and comprised twenty-five buildings. Today, it is 640 acres with thirty-seven buildings.
The original General Motors Technical Center was designed around a 22 acre lake that contains four islands, its rectilinear shape defining the shape of the original campus. Five Saarinen-designed building complexes surround the lake: one at each end, and three lining the eastern side of the lake. The complexes are low, one- to three-story structures with metal and glass curtain walls and colored glazed brick end walls. Eero Saarinen designed five primary facilities. Each of these consists of wings articulated according to their function and attached to one another by slender, glass enclosed corridors or elevated bridges. While maintaining an overall horizontality, the differing heights of parts of buildings also create variety. Their setting in a highly ordered, classical landscape effectively extends the geometry of the buildings directly into the open space. Saarinen also designed a 115' long and 50' high fountain to sit in the place of a ten story office building which was part of the original design, but was not constructed. An additional 132' stainless steel fountain was built in the northeastern corner of the lake to provide further height variety.
The primary building built around the lake include: the Research Center (to the north; Manufacturing B, Manufacturing A, Central Restaurant, and Global Portfolio Development Center (east), and the Design Center (south). All of these original buildings are one to three stories. They are organized by function, and most include an administration wing and a one and a half story shop or laboratory in to the side or in the back, connected to the main building by a glass covered corridor. The automobile was an obvious source of inspiration for the Technical Center. Nearly all of the original twenty-five buildings were curtain wall construction: the structural I-beams were expressed on the exterior, visible in standardized intervals, with clear and opaque glass, as well as enameled steel panels, set into the aluminum frames. The end walls of most buildings feature colored glazed brick to lighten the industrial aesthetic. Additionally, the buildings were all prefabricated, each piece built in a factory elsewhere and assembled on site. Short, long buildings (none were over three stories tall) took a cue from Albert Kahn's factory design in Detroit. Many of the interiors of the main buildings were decorated with walnut wall paneling, travertine floors, and an iconic spiral granite staircase suspended by steel tension rods. The exception is the prominent Styling Auditorium (located in the Design Center complex) which is defined by its shiny dome. It is 65' wide and 185' across. The Design Center is, "one of the most distinctive complexes at the Technical Center" (NRHP). Some differences in the design from the other buildings include: the Administration building (in the front of the complex) was supposed to elevated onto concrete pilotis (though it was not due to the need for space) and it also had an interior gold leaf "grotto" as well as an executive dining room called the "blue room" because of its blue plastic laminate and blue fabric wall paneling; the one-story circular garage glad in yellow glazed brick also contained a color studio ontop of it (was destroyed in a fire in 1979, but was rebuilt later); and the Design Auditorium (then called the Styling Auditorium), which featured an aluminum clad dome which sits on a one story black glazed panel base. A Design Fabrication Building was built by Argonaut in 1968 in back of the studio. Another building of note is the 1954 Central Restaurant, for which Saarinen won an AIA honor award in 1955. It is a one and a half story structure with a flat roof and overhanging eaves on three sides of the building. Three of the facades are curtain walls, and there is a black glazed brick wall on the other side.
Saarinen and Church created roadways lined with trees that framed viewsheds seen from the car; "the placement of roadways highlights distinctive building facades, artwork, fountains, and other elements of the campus" (NRHP). They also planned a series of expansive lawns that reinforced the rectilinear nature of the original campus. Parking lots have since taken over many of these lawns. Other structures include three Saarinen-designed gate houses (one was demolished), a water pumping plant and sewage treatment plant, and a test track.
Buildings on the west campus which are not original include the Research Engineering Lab North (1952, Saarinen consulted on it); the Research Chemical Laboratory (1953/Argonaut); another Research Chemical Laboratory (1977/Argonaut); the Facilities Operations Building (1969/ Argonaut); a Wind Tunnel (1953/Argonaut); the Research Safety Health and Environment Building (1977/Argonaut); and the Aerodynamics Lab (1979/Argonaut)
The original center (also known as the west campus) is separated from the slightly newer east campus by a railroad track that runs though the land north to south. The east campus was designed largely by Argonaut Realty, with some direction by Saarinen. It emulates some of the Saarinen/Church landscaping features, such as tree plantings around parking lots and roadways. However, the planning of the east side was far less successful: it has no formal border and need for space necessitated a smaller lake (11 acres) and less trees. There is also a disjuncture in architectural styles as well as formal arrangement, as additions were added in a piecemeal fashion.
The east lake is surrounded by two buildings: the Powertrain Engineering Center (1953-55/Argonaut) to the west, and the 1953-55 Vehical Engineering Center (featuring the new addition) to the south. There is parking lot and the Chevrolet Central Office to the north of the lake. These buildings were not built by Saarinen, though the earlier buildings on the east side were influenced by his design: although much larger, the arrangement of their functions was similar, as was the exposed I-beams and bands of white brick and enameled steel panels. The Vehical Engineering Center is the largest complex with 1.7 million square feet of floor space.
Other buildings on the east side include: the Vehicle Eningeering Center West (1953-1955/Argonaut), Primary Switch House and Hazardous Waste Building (1953-55/Argonaut), Chevrolet Central Office (1959-62/Argonaut), GM Management Training Center (1965/Argonaut); Emissions Building (1970/Argonaut); Cadillac Headquarters (a radical departure from the surrounding buildings, built in 1980/Argonaut); 7000 Building (also inconsistent, built in 1978/Argonaut), Service Technology Building (1979/Argonaut), and the Worldwide Purchasing Building (1985/ Argonaut).
There is also another section of the Technical Center, located south of 12 Mile Road. There are four buildings here: Central Mail Building (1958/Arognaut), General Storage Building 1 (1961/Argonaut), Parts Fabrication Building (1951, Argo), and General Storage Building 2 (1970/Argonaut).
The initial period of construction was between 1949 and 1956. Detriot-based Smith, Hinchman and Grylls were the engineers on the project and managed the general contractor, Bryant and Detwiler. The main buildings were completed by 1955, with all of the remaining structures completed in 1956. Assembly line construction: modular units were made off site and then assembled easily on site, Saarinen's design. The foundations were concrete, the roofs were asphalt, and the walls were generally steel, aluminum, glass, brick, and concrete.
The General Motors Technical Center is located in Warren, twelve miles north of downtown Detroit. Warren has grown to be Michigan's third largest city. Many corporate headquarters can be found in its suburban environment. Daimler Chrysler's Dodge City manufacturing complex is also in the proximity. The city prides itself in its "Small town lifestyle, big city commerce."
Eero Saarinen faced the problem of constructing modern curtain walled buildings during an early period in the development of this type of architecture and method of construction. He was assisted by GM's engineers; they developed innovative solutions to a number of technical problems together. Among the most innovative building techniques employed at the Technical Center were rubber mountings, or gaskets, used to make the seals around the glazed and porcelain enameled steel panels in the curtain walls watertight. This technique was developed after caulking applied to the windows of the first buildings constructed at the Technical Center failed, allowing water to leak into the interiors. Neoprene rubber gaskets used for this purpose had been developed by GM's Inland Manufacturing Division for the installation of automobile windshields, and, through a collaborative effort between the architects and GM, were adapted for use in the construction of the Technical Center. Another new technique was used in the production of glazed brick for the distinctive end walls of various structures in the Technical Center. After consultation between the architect and GM's AC Spark Plug Division, which used ceramics in the manufacture of its products, a glazing compound was produced that allowed the bricks to retain their color. The bricks were then made on site in a special kiln. The prefabricated metal panels used, along with glass, in the curtain walls of the Technical Center were also innovative because they employed a honeycomb patterned paper core sandwiched between two porcelain enameled sheets of steel to provide insulation. This technology was borrowed from the aircraft industry. At the Technical Center, Saarinen was among the first architects to employ these panels for building construction. In addition to GM engineers, the Styling Staff assisted Saarinen with the Technical Center, helping develop the first completely luminous ceiling through the design of modular molded plastic pans that allowed no reflections or shadows to be produced. These were used in the Styling Staff's drafting studios to assist in the design of new automobiles. The architects and building engineers working on the Technical Center also developed innovative construction techniques independently of GM's engineers. The most significant of these was the prefabricated aluminum extrusion frame used in the curtain walls. In order to hang the curtain walls from the steel frame of the buildings, exterior steel columns were wrapped with extruding aluminum to which the other materials in the curtain walls were attached. This would eventually become a common building technique. Perhaps the most remarkable new construction methodology occurred at the domed Styling Auditorium, which was designed to allow the viewing of new car designs under a variety of lighting conditions. Standing 65 feet high, with a span of 186 feet, the concept for this self-supporting aluminum clad dome was derived from the pressure vessel industry, which manufactured industrial metal tanks. Constructed of aluminum plates, the stressed metal skin of the dome was attached to the base of the structure by a tension ring, which also supported an interior acoustical dome serving as the auditorium's ceiling. (Evaluation from the National Register for Historic Preservation Nomination.)
The General Motors Tech Center was the world's first campus of buildings designed with the specific function to support a corporation's technological research and development. When inaugurated, seventy-eight newspapers covered the event and an unprecedented broadcasting by NBC transmits it to all parts of the nation. Hollywood stars were invited to attend and unveil the glistening titanium Firebird II (presented together with the Tech Center). An address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower was broadcasted via radio from Washington, D.C. on May 16, 1985. The event was reported as symbolic of the promise of technology in postwar America. General Motors' progress echoed the excitement and confidence 1950s America had in itself. Many innovations in the automotive industry have been carried out in the Technical Center. Soon after the first GM personnel relocated to Warren, they started work on the advanced research and engineering projects the campus was constructed to facilitate. A prime example was the Isotope Research Laboratory, which was part of the Research Staff facilities. The Styling Staff studied human measurement data in order to develop a system for designing car interiors contoured to the human body. The advanced computer facilities of the Engineering Staff allowed GM to devise GMR DYANA, a new computer programming language that facilitated the use of computers to answer engineering problems. At the laboratories of the Research Staff, work on the oxidation of automobile exhausts carried out in the late 1950s played a role in the development of the catalytic converter, which reduces harmful emissions that produce smog. The ultimate goal of the innovative work of the Technical Center was to allow GM to improve its production methods and manufacture new and better automobiles. As was often the case in the automobile industry, innovations did not mean the production of entirely new automotive technology but incremental changes in products over the course of several years. These constant innovations resulted in automobiles that improved over time, such as the Chevrolet Corvette, recognized as one of the great American automobiles. (Evaluation from the National Register for Historic Preservation Nomination.)
The General Motors Tech Center was the pioneer of the American suburban/corporate campus of low-rise, curtain-walled pavilions in a park-like setting. Its arrangement of International Style facilities around a rectangular lake was inspired by Mies van der Rohe's design for the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Instead of making it a pedestrian campus, Saarinen drew inspiration from GM's principal product: the automobile. As Saarinen stated: "The Center was, of course, designed at automobile scale and the changing vistas were conceived to be seen as one drove around the project." Saarinen was the first to translate Mies van der Rohe's austere purity into a sleeker, more American package. The Modern Movement's architectural forms became thinner, slicker, and more geometrically classicizing than they were before. GM's principal need was the provision of flexible interior spaces that would allow for the regular rearrangement of office and technical areas. Saarinen had to eliminate interior columns to create large open areas, using moveable partition walls to delineate offices and shops. Utilities and mechanical equipment were installed within this modular framework to facilitate alterations. Another of GM's main requests was to avoid the usual drab appearance of factory buildings. The sleek, modular design was articulated on the exterior through exposed I-beams that were placed at regular intervals, usually every five feet. Attention to design is apparent in the machinery within shop and technical areas, even the color of such equipment was carefully considered. This mix of design and technology is most evident in the Dynamometer Building at the Engineering Center. Here exhaust stacks that carry emissions from the dynamometers that test engines become the iconic image of the building. (Evaluation from the National Register for Historic Preservation Nomination.)
The importance of Saarinen's achievement has continued to receive recognition (in 1985 when the AIA awarded the Technical Center its 25 Year Award for enduring significance in the development of American architecture). Saarinen won an AIA Honor Ward in 1955 for the Central Restaurant. Architectural historians have recognized the significance of the GM Technical Center as well: Henry-Russell Hitchcock considered the Technical Center "a major example of American industrial building raised at the behest of a corporate client into the realm of distinguished architecture," and Saarinen "one of the leaders of post-war architecture in the United States...." Allan Temko saw the Technical Center as one of the first significant examples of the International Style in the post-war United States, and said that Saarinen's design was "one of the first major triumphs of the new architecture in this country. Where else, in the early 1950's, could one see industrial technology brought to bear so imaginatively on so many vexing problems of contemporary design?" Several architectural historians have commented that, at the Technical Center, Saarinen created an American interpretation of the International Style. The Technical Center remains a preeminent corporate research and development center, the site of some of GM's most important technological advances, it is architecturally significant as one of the most influential examples of International Style Architecture in American Corporate developments, and is an outstanding example of Eero Saarinen's work. The success of its original design can be attributed to Saarinen's ability to achieve a work of architectural art while at the same time satisfying GM's need for a functional, flexible workplace that could respond to the changing needs of technology.
Fortune magazine hailed the Tech Center as "one of the century's notable contributions to an integrated industrial architecture," Architectural Forum said that the Tech Center is "an architectural feat which may be unique in our lifetime."
Saarinen designed four more corporate facilities after the General Motors Tech Center: IBM's Thomas A. Watson Research Center (Yorktown, NY, 1961), the Bell Telephone Research Laboratories (Holmdel, NJ, 1962), and the John Deere and Company Headquarters (Moline, IL, 1963), and the CBS Building (NY, NY, 1965).
(Evaluation predominantly from the National Register for Historic Preservation Nomination.)
The General Motors technical Center is historically significant as one of the preeminent corporate research and development centers constructed in the United States in the period following World War II, as the site of some of GM's most important technological advances, and as the site at which some of the most renowned American automobiles were designed. The Technical Center is architecturally significant as one of the earliest and most influential examples of the application of the International Style to American corporate architecture and as an outstanding example of the work of internationally prominent architect Eero Saarinen. Using a specific design vocabulary, Saarinen and Church created a rectilinear plan that produced a unity between the landscape and Saarinen's distinctive modernist buildings. With its large open spaces and wide vistas, Saarinen and Church created a classical landscape that effectively extended the geometry of the buildings directly into the landscape. It is no accident to call the campus the "Versailles of Industry." (Evaluation predominantly from the National Register for Historic Preservation Nomination.)
Associated Press. "GM to start work in June on new research center." The New York Times 22 May 1949.
BCA Research files on the General Motors Technical Center. (New York Office, Claudia Kavenaugh).
"Gen. Motors to Dedicate New Center." Chicago Daily Tribune 9 Apr 1956.
General Motors Public Relations Staff. "Where Today Meets Tomorrow: General Motors Technical Center." GM: Detroit, 1956.
"General Motors Technical Center." Michigan Modern, 4 Jan 2010. Web 4 Aug 2010 .
GM Corporate History Website. General Motors. Web. 10 Aug 2010 .
"GM's Engineering Center." Interiors Magazine, January 1957.
"GM Celebrates 60th Anniversary of the Automatic Transmission." Automotive Intelligence, 1999. Web. 10 Aug 2010 .
"GM Technical Center." Parsons Brinckerhoff. Web 6 Aug 2010 .
KMD Architects. Web. 9 Aug 2010 .
Louchheim, Aline B. "Now Saarinen The Son." The New York Times 26 April 26 1953.
Makovsky, Paul. "Motor City." Metropolis Magazine 1 June 2003. Web. 8 Aug 2010 .
Mullaney, Thomas E. "GM's Expansion is 60% completed." The New York Times 9 Jan 1955.
National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: General Motors Technical Center. OMB No. 1024-0018. 9 Jan 2000. Web. 7 Aug 2010 < http://michiganmodern.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/gmtechcenter_nr-nomina....
Pierce, Brett. "General Motors Speeds Research." The New York Times 25 July 1945.
"Versailles of Industry." Official Harley Earl Website. Web. 4 Aug 2010 .


text: I just installed the halflife patch with team fortress classic. I want to play a single player game so I can get more used to the controls. When I select new game, and select my character class I wind up falling into a pit first thing that I can't get out off no matter how hard I try. This is the first part of the game where the tram starts in the intro to regular half-life. I tried to be quick and select a character that way I would fall right onto the tram, but no luck I just get stuck and the tram won't move. If I jump out, the tram moves on ahead without me, and I fall into the pit I cant't the hell out of. Can you just not play a singleplayer game in Team Fortress.

subset: commoncrawl


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Suz on Family Tree Circles
sort: Date Alphabetical
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Journals and Posts
Seeking gene. info.: Claude Edward Martin, DOB 7/29/1893; Cortland Co. NY
Claude was born in Binghamton, NY - Married Anna Irene Matthews - Resided Marathon, NY
Parents: Henry Martin & Maggie (Margaret?) Brown
Henry's Parents: William Martin & Mary West
English Descent
Does anyone have any information?
- Displaying 1-1 of 1 Journals
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Strawberry and 7 Deadly s{K}ins offering at Ho Depot.
Strawberry and 7 Deadly s{K}ins offering at Ho Depot.
We are SL's new premier building school, bringing you new techniques, ideas, inspiration. We also take great care in teaching from the ground up, the very begining, to give you the strongest foundations to begin your experience creating in SL.
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Loooking in SL every day for the best things to show!
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All the news about TV, film, literature, the environment and more that you could want
-From Our Hamper to YOUR Closet-
second life fashion blog
Harper Beresford's love of fashion, one day at a time.
after being inworld I do ALT + Zoom on webpages


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News from the world of Maths
Images are now being taken on the world's most powerful digital camera. For over 500 nights over the next five years the Dark Energy Camera will photograph the light from more than 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light-years away in each image.
In their new show X&Y Marcus du Sautoy and Victoria Gould use mathematics and the theatre to navigate the known and unknown reaches of our world.
If you like the Rubik's cube then you might love the Magic Cube. It's got numbers on the little faces rather than colours and it's quite a bit harder.
A nice new interactive map shows how papers published in various maths related areas relate.
A team of Australian researchers has delivered dire news for polar ecosystems, predicting that in some regions biodiversity may be reduced by as much as a third within decades. It's the result of a tipping point induced by global warming.
This year's British Science Festival will take place from 7 - 12 September at the University of Newcastle and there's plenty of (mostly free) maths on offer.
Why are drug induced hallucinations so compelling that they apparently provided much of the inspiration for early forms of abstract art? Researchers suggest that the answer hinges on an interplay between the mathematics of pattern formation and a mechanism that generates a sense of value and meaning.


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We strive to educate students at the University so that they are prepared to use mathematics intelligently in their chosen fields of study and to understand mathematics as it affects their lives and participation in public affairs. The Mathematics Program provides its majors and graduate students with preparation for careers in education, science, and commerce, as well as providing a solid foundation for further study in mathematics. We also strive to serve our community by providing expertise to local schools, industry, and business.
Center for Instruction Room 301
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
6300 Ocean Drive, Unit 5825
Corpus Christi, TX 78412-5825
Phone: (361) 825-2459
Fax: (361) 825-2795
Email: email@example.com


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Verena Ringler - Minna
Enlargement Fatigue
Long before the French and Dutch referenda on the EU constitution in 2005, ESI had began researching public attitudes towards further enlargement in key EU member states. Since late 2004 Minna Jarvenpaa was representing ESI in Brussels, analysing implications for the Balkans of the shifting European mood. Then ESI was joined by Verena Ringler, previously a journalist at the Austrian magazine Profil and at Foreign Policy Magazine in Washington. She began research on Austria, where scepticism about enlargement was running high. In late 2005 Verena Ringler and Gerald also began to study the debate on Turkish enlargement in the Netherlands.
Further reading


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Toward the end of John Banville's new novel, "The Infinities" (Knopf; $25.95), a more or less contemporary tale over which the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes rather startlingly preside, a snooty character to whom someone is describing an "updated" production of a play about the parents of Hercules declares that he "does not approve of the classics being tampered with": the Greeks, he says, "knew what they were doing, after all." The joke is that the pretentious young man doesn't know what he's talking about. The play in question, "Amphitryon"—whose themes, of adultery, confused identities, and improbable Olympian interventions, are actually the model for Banville's novel—isn't Greek at all. Rather, it's an early-nineteenth-century German reworking of late-seventeenth-century French and English rewritings of a second-century-B.C. tragicomedy written in Latin. And that was just then. In the twentieth century alone, the Amphitryon myth has been adapted by a French novelist, two German playwrights, an opera composer, an anti-Nazi filmmaker, and Cole Porter. Have we ever done anything but tamper with the classics?
No one, as it happens, tampered more than the Greeks themselves. Shaped as we are by printed literature, we tend to think about myths as texts as immutable as, say, "Anna Karenina." In the same way we know that Anna Karenina is the woman whose passion leads her to the underside of a railway carriage, we think of Oedipus as a man who unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother, Jocasta, and then, after the ghastly revelation of what he has done, blinds himself and goes into exile. (Jocasta hangs herself.) If the name Helen of Troy comes up, we think of the adulterous Greek wife whose passion for a handsome house guest started a world war. But for the Greeks—whose culture was, even in classical times, still a largely oral one—myth was a great deal more fluid. Not twenty years after Sophocles put on his "Oedipus Tyrannus"—whose huge popularity from ancient times on has crystallized the self-blinding-exile-hanging version of the story—Euripides presented his tragedy "Phoenician Women," in which Oedipus and Jocasta are still shuffling around the palace long after the revelation of incest and adultery. As for Helen of Troy, some people may be startled to learn that she might not have run away with Paris at all—and that, therefore, the decade-long Trojan War, like some other wars through the ages, was based on a fatal hoax. In his play "Helen," Euripides dramatized a tale that had been in circulation since not long after Homer. Here the woman whom Paris takes home is just a phantom spun from clouds; the real Helen, virtuous and loyal, is spirited away to Egypt, where she weeps for her sullied reputation and mourns her husband, Menelaus, who eventually turns up and rescues her.
To us, brought up on the D'Aulaires' "Book of Greek Myths," all this may seem odd. It's as if Tolstoy's novel were only one of many possible "Anna Karenina"s, and there was a version in which the heroine acts on her final, panicked moment of hesitation, climbs back from underneath the train in the nick of time, and goes home to squabble with Karenin. But the Greeks had no "Book of Greek Myths"; they just kept tampering. They knew what they were doing, after all.
Banville's book is one of three recent novels—the others are David Malouf's "Ransom" (Pantheon; $24) and Zachary Mason's "The Lost Books of the Odyssey" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $24)—that not only revisit Greek stories but, far more interestingly, do so in a Greek way, playing with the texts of the past in order to create, with varying degrees of success, a literature that is thoroughly of the present. By far the most profound and successful of these is Malouf's. The novel is a riff on the twenty-fourth (and final) book of the Iliad—the book whose climax is the unbearably tense and poignant meeting between the Greek hero Achilles and the aged Trojan king, Priam, who comes to the Greek camp in order to ransom the body of his fallen son, Hector. Like Euripides, Malouf has scrutinized the vast fabric of Homer's story, looking for open spaces in the weave to insert his own design. He has found them in the last lines of the poem, where an extraordinary thing happens: one of the characters tries to imagine an alternative to the foreordained narrative. Priam and Achilles have been sketching the details of a truce that will give the Trojans time to mourn and bury Hector, and decide that eleven days is sufficient. "On the twelfth," Homer's Priam says, "we'll fight again . . . if fight we must." That "if we must"—pregnant with the tantalizing, wishful possibility that the two sides might not have to fight anymore, that we can break out of character and create a new history—is the subject of Malouf's subtle and extremely moving novel.
For the most part, the author follows the plot of Homer's poem, which, in its final book, enacts a great drama of restitution and resolution. At the beginning of the Iliad, the Greek commander Agamemnon steals a captured princess, part of the spoils of war, from Achilles. The affront provokes the great warrior to sit out the fighting—until his beloved friend, Patroclus, is killed by Hector. Returning to the field, he kills Hector in single combat and, in an outrageous violation of religious propriety, refuses to give back the body for proper burial, lashing it to his chariot and dragging it around the walls of Troy. Offended, the gods intervene, ordering Achilles to relent and Priam to go to the Greek camp and offer Achilles a huge treasure as ransom for the body of his son. (It is at this point that Malouf picks up the story.) Priam, whose name, as Malouf knows, could be taken as meaning "ransom"—as a young prince, he had been a prisoner of war, ultimately ransomed (priatos) as a favor to his sister—obeys this divine order, and travels to the Greek camp. His eventual return to Troy with Hector's body (the point at which Malouf's narrative ends) precipitates a great outpouring of lamentation on the part of the Trojans which, we are meant to feel, will serve not only as an appropriately cathartic ending but also as their own funeral lament, since Troy itself will soon fall. Thus the work that begins with a man refusing to give up a body—Agamemnon won't return the captive girl—ends with another man, Achilles, finally agreeing to give up a body that doesn't belong to him, either. The epic travels a great arc from selfishness and ethical rigidity to a magnificent relenting.
Malouf's paraphrases of Homer are highly inventive, embroidered with imaginative details that often reanimate familiar elements of the epic. There's a famous and shocking moment when Homer's Hecuba, the mother of the dead Hector, wishes that she could eat Achilles' liver raw; Malouf's Hecuba expresses pretty much the same wish, but with an additional, modern consideration. "I carried him," she hisses at her husband. "It is my flesh that is being tumbled on the stones out there." And this is what Malouf does with the divine appearances that happen so often in Homer: "The air, as in the wake of some other, less physical disturbance, shimmers with a teasing iridescence," Priam thinks. "The gods will materialise, jelly-like, out of the radiant vacancy." "Jelly-like" is a wonderful touch, giving this mythic scene a novel concreteness.
"Novel" is, indeed, the operative word here. Ultimately, "Ransom" is a rich meditation on literary genre—on the difference between Homer's form, the epic, with its encrustations of formulaic language, its strict codes of heroic behavior, and its fated ending, and Malouf's own form, the novel. In "Ransom," Priam reflects sourly on his long life of ceremony:
In his own world a man spoke only to give shape to a decision he had come to, or to lay out an argument for or against. To offer thanks to one who had done well, or a reproof, either in anger or gentle regret, to one who had not. To pay a compliment whose decorative phrases, and appeals to vanity or family pride, were fixed and of ancient and approved form.
This is the world of epic, a world governed by conventions that, at the beginning of the novel, neither Priam, in his passive grief, nor Achilles, driving around in circles that symbolize his endless, fruitless rage, knows how to break out of. ("This knot we are all tied in" is how Malouf's Priam describes the impasse.) For Malouf, the solution to this epic problem is, in both senses of the word, the novel—a new way of thinking, and a new form for thinking it. In his retelling, Zeus' messenger Iris doesn't order Priam to go to Achilles; rather, she subtly suggests that Priam is free to act as he likes, that things are not foreordained but simply "the way they are. Not the way they must be, but the way they have turned out. In a world that is also subject to chance." It is at this moment that Priam has the idea of going to Achilles not as a king but as a father, "to take on the lighter bond of being simply a man"; he suspects, correctly, that Achilles will be just as happy to "break free of the obligation of being always the hero." In a marvellous aside, Priam wonders whether this relaxation of coded behavior may in fact be "the real gift" that he will be bringing to Achilles—the real ransom.
Priam gets to sample his newfound freedom during his journey across the plain to the Greek camp, in a simple cart and with only one humble companion. The episode is brief enough in Homer, but here it opens out into a mini-Odyssey, in which the King, for the first and last time in his life, experiences the pleasures of an existence that didn't become the focus of serious literature until the rise of the novel, more than two millennia after Homer: the life of ordinary people. Accompanied, in this version, not by his royal herald Idreus, as in Homer, but by a talkative carter named Somax (an appropriately concrete name: soma is the Greek word for body), Priam wiggles his hot toes in cold water, learns how pancakes are made, and sees that the world "of ceremony, of high play" to which he has always belonged is merely "representational . . . and had nothing to do with the actual and immediate." He realizes that "out here," in the real world—which is to say, in the new narrative space that Malouf's novel invents—"everything was just itself."
The pathos of Malouf's novel, as in that one half-line of Homer's Iliad, is that the possibility of a different ending, of a life filled with simple pleasures, is and must always be a fleeting one: the end of "Ransom" includes a terrifying flash-forward to the grotesque murder of the aged Priam at the hands of Achilles' young son, Neoptolemus, during the sack of Troy. But for the duration of this book Malouf's Priam, like his creator, has done something truly novel. "He has stepped into a space that till now was uninhabited and found a way to fill it," he thinks as he drives his son's body home. "Look, he wants to shout, I am still here, but the I is different." So is your sense of the possibilities of Homer's story, once you've read Malouf. This is tampering at its very best.
The coda of "Ransom" informs you that Somax, long after the Trojan War is over, goes on telling the tale of Priam's remarkable journey to anyone who will listen—becoming, that is, the first of many bards in a long line that leads to Homer. This preoccupation with how history becomes myth, how stories become epics, is a very Greek one, and lies at the heart of the other Homeric epic, which furnishes the material for Zachary Mason's "The Lost Books of the Odyssey."
The first adjective in the first line of the twelve thousand one hundred and nine that make up the Odyssey is polytropos, which means, in the context, "clever"—literally, "of many turns." Both are apt modifiers for the poem's hero, who is subject to many detours and is also Greek myth's preëminent talker, fibber, and plotter. If the Iliad, set during a war, keeps showing us men's bodies, either in frenzied action or stilled by death, the Odyssey, set in war's aftermath, can be described as a poem about the mind—a celebration of the intellectual and verbal qualities that we might need to survive in a world uneasily settling back into the forgotten habits of peacetime. And a quality of mind that the Odyssey admires extravagantly is the ability to tell a good story. It's easy to forget that nearly all the famous adventures we associate with Odysseus—the encounters with the Cyclops, the witch Calypso, Scylla and Charybdis, the Lotus Eaters—are narrated not by the poem's invisible narrator, the "I" who invokes the Muse in the first line, but by Odysseus, about himself. At a certain point in his voyage, he finds himself on an island inhabited by refined, pleasure-loving natives called the Phaeacians, and, one night over dinner, he tells them the story of his homecoming thus far. This takes up four entire books of Homer's poem—which is to say that much of the Odyssey is a kind of epic performance within the epic, a long flashback in which the "poet" and the hero are one and the same person.
This self-conscious interest in narrative gamesmanship and in the nature of storytelling gives Zachary Mason the modishly postmodern theme of his book, the Preface of which tells us that the chapters that follow are translations of newly discovered sections of the Odysseus cycle: "forty-four concise variations on Odysseus' story . . . where the familiar characters are arranged in new tableaux." So, for example, the first such tableau ("A Sad Revelation") consists of a three-page-long variation on the epic's famous ending: here Odysseus returns home to a Penelope who waited only twelve years, instead of the canonical twenty, before marrying a man who has been courting her. The moment the hero understands what has happened, he tells himself that "this is not Penelope . . . this is not Ithaca—what he sees before him is a vengeful illusion." Odysseus turns and "flees the tormenting shadows," presumably en route to further wandering.
Many, if not most, of Mason's tiny chapters have the gnomic, abbreviated feel of this one. If Homer's Odyssey is expansive, Mason's Odysseys are studies in compression, but brevity brings many of them close to triviality: too often the sections end with inconclusive teases ("Also not recorded is whether Odysseus had poisoned the ring or whether he had found the word and it sufficed") or with riddles to which, you suspect, the author himself doesn't have an answer.
Some chapters, however, are extremely inventive and suggestive. "Record of a Game" imagines that the Iliad is a text that began as a chess primer: "The purity of the primer eroded over time—formulaic descriptions were added as aides-mémoire (pieces were called swift-moving, versatile, valuable in the middle game, and so forth). . . . By the eighth century B.C. the instructional character of the primer had largely atrophied and the recitation of the by then baroquely ornamented text had become an end in itself." In "The Book of Winter," an amnesiac living in a hut at the frozen edges of the world realizes, after reading a book that turns out to be the Odyssey, that he is Odysseus: in order to escape the wrath of Poseidon (whose harassment is the reason for Odysseus' long wanderings), he has forgotten who he is and become "no one." But as readers of the Odyssey know, No One is the false name Odysseus uses to trick the Cyclops: when the Cyclops' neighbors come to help after Odysseus has blinded him, he keeps saying "No One has attacked me," at which point they go away. The word in classical Greek—outis—sounds enough like Odysseus to constitute a kind of pun. No One is precisely who Odysseus has always been.
Alternating between the extremely rich and the insubstantial, "The Lost Books of the Odyssey" finally leaves you unsatisfied, like a meal of hors d'oeuvres. As you go through the book, it occurs to you that Mason thinks he's doing what Malouf has managed to do—opening a space in the original epic and finding something new to say. The newness that interests him has to do with what academics call "narrativity." One chapter, entitled "Fragment," consists of a single paragraph:
Odysseus, finding that his reputation for trickery preceded him, started inventing histories for himself and disseminating them wherever he went. This had the intended effect of clouding perception and distorting expectation, making it easier for him to work as he was wont, and the unexpected effect that one of his lies became, with minor variations, the Odyssey of Homer.
The author's suggestion that the Odyssey itself is just one reflecting surface in a giant literary hall of mirrors has won the book extravagant praise; it feels like such a contemporary conceit, something out of Borges or Calvino.
The problem is that the narrative conjuring tricks that Mason attempts pale, in both scale and complexity, beside the ones that Homer mastered three millennia ago. The Odyssey constantly toys with the possibility that it is just one of a number of alternative epics: at one point, a bard at a feast starts singing a kind of parallel Iliad, in which Achilles quarrels not with Agamemnon but with Odysseus. Even more dizzyingly—and troublingly—Homer's poem makes you wonder whether there's any more reason for us to "believe" the stories that Odysseus tells his Phaeacian audience (the Cyclops, the Lotus Eaters, and so on) than there is to believe certain other long yarns that he spins. Once he's back in Ithaca, for instance, he poses as a Cretan and tells three notoriously elaborate autobiographical stories, all of which contain elements from what we think of as his "real" life. It's at this point that you start to wonder what words like "real" and "true" mean in a work that is itself a fiction.
Yet, playful as the Odyssey is, it is always serious. At the heart of its narrative Russian dolls and suggestive punning is a profound, ongoing exploration of identity: what does it mean, after all, if your cleverness, the trick that at once defines you and which you need to stay alive, reduces you to being "no one"? At the end of the Odyssey, you get the answers to questions that start forming in the first line, the first word of which is andra, "man": to be a man, a human being, wildly inventive and creative but inevitably subject to dreadful forces beyond our control—which is to say, death—is to be something wonderful and, at the same time, "nothing." The clever games that the Odyssey plays are, in the end, games worth playing. In Mason's book, the seriousness gets lost; it's too clever by half.
Both the Iliad and the Odyssey wrestle with paradoxes of life and death, mortality and immortality. Achilles is willing to die young if it means winning undying renown; Odysseus will do almost anything to survive his journey, but when he's offered immortality by the amorous nymph Calypso he rejects her in favor of returning home to the aging Penelope (surely the greatest tribute that any marriage has ever received). The allure of immortality and the competing rewards of a humble human life are the themes that animate John Banville's "The Infinities," which, like the novels by Malouf and Mason, has things to tell us about the act of adaptation.
The myth that Banville adapts is that of the Theban king Amphitryon (a story that he engaged with a decade ago, when he produced an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's "Amphitryon"). In the story, Amphitryon goes off to war and, while he's away, Zeus assumes his form and seduces his unsuspecting wife, Alcmena. The confusion of identities leads to theatrical and philosophical complications, and, ultimately, to the birth of twin children, one of whom is Hercules. The novel, like its model, not only toys with genres—it starts out as a deathbed drama and ends with a surprising deus ex machina—but also wrestles with deeper questions. Chief among these is the paradox that human creativity (and procreativity) seeks to attain a kind of immortality—"infinity"—and yet mortality, the knowledge that we are finite, is what gives beauty and meaning to life. (The existence of the Greek gods, "immortal and ageless," might, you suspect, be pretty boring, in the end.)
The title "The Infinities" refers to a revolutionary theory promulgated by the novel's main character, an eminent mathematician with the heavily symbolic name Adam Godley. His work has somehow unlocked the key to infinity and made it possible "to write equations across the many worlds, incorporating their infinities . . . and therefore all those other dimensions"—perhaps even, it seems, death itself. When the book begins, Godley has suffered a colossal stroke, and the plot follows his family during what seems likely to be his last day on earth. There's his much younger, hard-drinking wife, Ursula; his son, also called Adam; his daughter-in-law Helen, an actress, who, like Alcmena, is unwittingly carrying on an affair with Zeus; and Godley's tormented daughter, Petra, whose boyfriend is the pretentious know-it-all who doesn't recognize the plot of "Amphitryon" even when he's in it.
By making his hero a mathematician, Banville can play with the theme of human striving after infinity in ingenious ways. Among other things, you come to realize that the world of the novel is not our own world but one of the parallel possible worlds to which Adam's discovery has provided the key. Here Mary, Queen of Scots triumphed against Elizabeth I, Scandinavia is a Middle East-like political mess plagued by endless wars, and energy is derived from saltwater. And, of course, the Greek gods are real; they envy humans and yearn for mortality—which they attempt to taste by means of "intercourse" both literal and figurative. Such premises give Banville a useful vehicle for his themes of mortality, creativity, and the possibility of making something truly new in a world that seems increasingly exhausted morally, politically, and spiritually.
And yet the book lacks a certain urgency. As often with this author—not least in his highly overwrought "The Sea," which won the Man Booker Prize—the conceits, the symbolic names and the ostentatiously "lyrical" diction are striking, but too often you feel that the author is simply amusing himself, swatting, like a cat at tinsel, at notions that have caught his eye. By the end, it's hard not to think that Banville himself has fallen into an error that his fictional Hermes observes in Adam Godley: "the peril of confusing the expression of something with the something itself."
About one thing "The Infinities" is not in the least confused: Lurking within it is the sly acknowledgment of a fact that has been clear to authors, if not to mathematicians, since that day, three millennia ago, when a blind itinerant singer tampered with some old heroic lays and turned them into the Iliad. Literature, like the universe that Adam Godley reveals, has always been "an infinity of infinities . . . all crossing and breaking into each other, all here and invisible, a complex of worlds." ♦


text: Mezzanine Systems - MTU Detroit Diesel, The Netherlands Sign up for our newsletter here!!! In the small storage capacity of MTU, Dexion has combined floor constructions; P90 racking on the floor, above a ME250 floor with HI280 shelving and on top another ME250 floor. MTU Detroit Diesel MTU Detroit Diesel Benelux has the regional responsibility in Sales, After-Sales support, Marketing & Application Engineering for the complete range of MTU, Detroit Diesel, Mercedes Benz industrial engines and VM Motori products for the Benelux region. They offer the most comprehensive range of products, with diesel engine and gas turbine solutions ranging from 15kW to 27,600kW for Marine, Industrial, PowerGen and Rail applications. MTU Detroit Diesel needed to store differing goods of varied measurements and weights, in a small space. By using the height of the building it was possible to store the goods as efficiently as possible. MTD were delighted with previous works carried out at another site by Constructor and so had no hesitation in placing an order to install their warehouse facilities again. Solution:It was decided to store the variety of goods in a mixture of P90 pallet racking and Hi280 shelving. On the ground for the large and heavy items P90 pallet racking was installed, above which was space for a ME250 mezzanine floor system. On the ME250 floor Hi280 shelving was installed to create a picking area for the smaller components. On top of Hi280 Constructor built another ME250 mezzanine floor. Elsewhere in the warehouse a double level, free standing ME250 mezzanine floor structure was also installed with tilting gates. Capacities:Pallet Racking P90: 50 sections of 2,500 x 2,700 x 1.100 mm (h x l x d) with 3 beam levels P90 mezzanine floor of 570 m2, loads up 600 kg/m2 Shelving System Hi280: 235 sections of 2,500 x 1,000 x 500 mm (h x l x d) with 5 shelves HI280 mezzanine floor of 380 m2, loads up 400 kg/m2 Mezzanine Systems ME250: Free standing floor, 2 floors together 175 m2. Carrying capacity: 1st floor: 600 kg/m2 2nd floor: 400 kg/m2 Additional items: Approximately 75 m railing 3 staircases 3 tilting gates Print Pdf Add


text:
On the night of the draft, the Cleveland Browns traded up to pick Johnny Manziel, but not until he sent the team a text message urging them to make the move.
Browns quarterbacks coach Dowell Loggains explained during a radio interview how it went down:
"We're sitting there and they keep showing Johnny on T.V. and Johnny and I are texting and he shoots me a text and he says, 'I wish you guys would come get me. Hurry up and draft me because I want to be there. I want to wreck this league together.'...When I got that text, I forwarded it to [owner Jimmy Haslam] and to [head coach Mike Pettine]...I'm like 'this guy wants to be here. He wants to be part of it.' As soon as that happened, Mr. Haslam said, 'pull the trigger. We're trading up to go get this guy.'''
It is an incredibly bold thing for a 21-year-old to do. But it is also exactly what most people would expect from the ever-confident Johnny Football and why so many people love him.
It is also a perfect example of the fuzzy line between myth and truth that always seems to envelop Manziel.
According to this story, the Browns traded up after deciding to draft Manziel.
However, this conflicts with another report from ESPNCleveland.com in which a source says the Browns were actually prepared to draft Teddy Bridgewater after trading up and even had his name written on a card ready to give to the commissioner.
According to that report, Haslem ordered a new card with Manziel's name on it "with ten seconds to go."
The Browns deny that this happened.
In the end, it may not matter which story is true.
But the story of Manziel's text message is what Johnny Football is all about and will just add to his ever-growing legend.


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|2007-10-21, 04:02
|Link #1
Just call me Ojisan
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: U.K. Hampshire
Gundam - Q & A
This thread is for those of you with questions about the Gundam anime or manga. There are many questions that don't need a whole thread to discuss them. A simple practical answer straight from the anime or manga without any speculation can solve these connundrums. If someone has such a question about Gundam which can be solved by answering with facts from an official source, then please ask that question here.
Please don't post in this thread unless you are asking a question or answering one. Please remember that it only takes 1 person to answer a question. And don't speculate! You can only reply with cold, hard, merciliessly unforgivable facts. If you have to speculate, then please just tell the querrant that no answer is known, but here are some facts that might help him make up his own mind.
Make sure you use spoiler tags if your question is about the anime, manga, or any non-anime source. Untagged spoilers are risking a ban. There are two ways to create clearly marked spoiler tags, as shown in the following:
The easy way: By simply clicking on this icon which can be found in the Quick Reply or Reply to Thread template. This is how I create spoiler tags.
orThe macho way: By using those uber vB codes as shown in the following...
Spoiler Tag Example
[spoiler=title, i.e. your reason for the spoiler tag]Don't forget to use a title for the spoiler![/spoiler]...becomes...
|2007-10-22, 00:04
|Link #3
the red string of fate
Join Date: Jan 2007
it's 人類革新連盟 (unlike the Union, AEU and Celestial being, which are written more or less in English), so there are multiple English translations. But there may eventually be some piece of English writing referencing the group (like the Aeolia Schenberg 'page' in episode 2), so there may be an official English equivalent of some sort in time.
|2007-10-22, 09:11
|Link #5
Supreme Grocer
|2007-10-23, 00:10
|Link #7
Catholic = Cat addiction?
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: MURICA!!
- Tak (And they say Marina is from the Middle East, but no matter how I look at it... she looks stereotypically Chinese, heh)
Last edited by Tak; 2007-10-23 at 00:32.
|2007-10-23, 12:27
|Link #9
the red string of fate
Join Date: Jan 2007
anyway, Deacon, if you do have some sort of source on that, I would like to see it. (its good to have one term for everyone to use) otherwise, gonna have to stick with there is no official English name till one arises.
Spoiler for :
Last edited by ashlay; 2007-10-23 at 12:40.
|2007-10-24, 05:56
|Link #13
Ancient Member
Join Date: Apr 2002
That's the announcement PV video released a month ago. I thought the names were cleared up then.
The official names of the fraction are Union of Solar Energy and Free Nations, Human Reform League, and Advanced European Union.
|2007-10-24, 10:49
|Link #15
the red string of fate
Join Date: Jan 2007
well, this will be handy. thanks brightman.
|2007-10-26, 23:01
|Link #17
You betcha. All of them look fairly interesting too. It's kind of similar to how Sunrise built up all those extra side story entries around Code Geass with the Picture Drama and Mangas. One is a prequel, one's a straight up adaptation, and one is running concurrent with the events of the show.
I hope Bandai/Sunrise keeps up with the practice. It's kind of similar to how a lot of popular American TV thrillers are adding material on the side to enhance viewer interest, if not quite as direct an approach. They did it with Xenoglossia too by having Haruka Amami maintain a blog that ran concurrent to the show. Anyways I digress, to date I don't think any announcements have been made about scanlating them, but I hope to be one of the first to learn of any such project.
|2007-10-27, 00:08
|Link #18
the red string of fate
Join Date: Jan 2007
though that seems to be fairly the same idea in most if not all these 00 manga, so no real change to your point.
|2007-10-31, 03:51
|Link #20
Secret Society BLANKET
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: 3 times the passion of normal flamenco
|Thread Tools


text:
Demand for unmanned aircraft looks strong for small systems
As the wars that have fueled the explosive growth in the use of unmanned systems wind down, the outlook for industry is beginning to look quite different, depending on where you stand in the market.
For small unmanned aircraft systems (SUAS), the arena is shifting from rapid, high-volume procurement to top-up buys, export sales, sustainment and upgrades, but demand continues to look robust.
For manufacturers interested in large UAS, the picture that emerged here at the industry's biggest showcase—the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's Unmanned Systems North America 2012—was less clear.
As the attention of military planners begins to shift away from irregular warfare and counterinsurgency, the services operating large UAS are taking time out to look at what would be required to fight a near-peer enemy.
The outlook points to:
•A U.S. Army moving to institutionalize the many UAS investments made over the past decade.
•A U.S. Air Force rethinking its plans to replace the workhorse Predator/Reaper fleet.
•A U.S. Navy, late to the unmanned game, that could be first to step to the next generation.
Four years ago, the Air Force began an "aggressive campaign" to launch the MQ-X program to replace its General Atomics Aeronautical Systems MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers, says Maj. Gen. James Poss, Air Force assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Now called the Next Generation RPA (for remotely piloted aircraft), the program has slipped into the next decade. "We recognize the need to operate in denied airspace and to have a capability available by the early to mid-2020s," says Poss. "We are watching with great interest what the Navy is doing, because we think we have a common problem."
While the services believe that today's UAS, designed to operate in permissive airspace, will not be survivable in combat against an enemy with sophisticated air defenses, they are not sure how to proceed. The Navy is first to tackle the problem with its plans to field the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike System (Uclass) by 2020.
"The Navy is struggling with how to execute [in denied airspace]," says Poss. "Do you go low-observable, do you swarm, or do you go with something cheap and cheery and attritable? We're not sure we know." Meanwhile, current-generation UAS, if equipped with the electronic countermeasures of a Block 50 F-16, "are surprisingly survivable."
"We want to stay well aligned with the Navy" as it proceeds with Uclass, says Poss. "And we are genuinely open to suggestions from industry on the best way to go."
But a problem for industry is the lack of investment in technology development to increase the capability and improve the efficiency of next-generation UAS. "More investment needs to be made to make the step to the next generation of utility," says Bob Ruszkowski, senior manager for market initiatives in the strategic studies group at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. "The time to invest is now," he adds.
"The UAS we use today with relative impunity in irregular warfare will have less utility in a major theater conflict because of their survivability," he says. Also, the manpower required to operate today's UAS, the effort needed to analyze all the data they collect, and closed architectures that make them hard to upgrade are shortcomings to that need be addressed.
In addition to being stealthy, a next-generation UAS should be capable of "full-spectrum operations and synergistic manned/unmanned missions, with an open architecture and streamlined infrastructure," says Ruszkowski. Technologies need to be developed in the areas of vehicle, communication and information autonomy; persistence and reliability; signature management; and open architectures. "We can use some of the technologies developed on our current systems, in intelligence analysis, for example."
Lockheed Martin has established a new business line within its Aeronautics sector to marshal company resources to develop "advanced ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] products, services and technologies," says Ruszkowski, and to pursue "significant opportunities" such as Uclass, for which it is offering the Sea Ghost UAS. Boeing, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and Northrop Grumman also are continuing to work on Uclass concept studies under Navy contract.
The Army has similar concerns about the survivability of its unmanned aircraft as it begins to look toward future conflicts, but its near-term focus is on the cost of operating a massive UAS fleet built up over two wars. "We are looking very deliberately at reducing cost of ownership," says Richard Kretzschmar, Army deputy program manager for UAS.
Although the war in Afghanistan is winding down, the Army is planning to increase, not reduce, its use of UAS by ensuring that more units have their own systems. The plan for procurement and deployment of the medium-sized General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle is now to field a company in every division. "That's a significant increase," he says.
There are also plans to push SUAS down to the squad level and to give small units the same ability to overmatch any enemy that the Army considers it has at the platoon and division levels. "At the squad level we are not as dominant. We want to give them the situational awareness and get them out of a fair fight," says Kretzschmar.
"The Army is looking at making the squad more engaged," says Roy Minson, senior vice present and general manager of AeroVironment's unmanned aircraft systems business, which supplies most of the Pentagon's small UAS. "They see the squad as a strategic force and want overwhelming power at the squad level. So we continue to see them filling out their requirements and incorporating the latest capabilities."
At the same time, the Army has almost completed its planned procurement of SUAS and is shifting its focus to sustainment and upgrades. After buying 6,000 RQ-11 Ravens and larger RQ-20 Pumas from AeroVironment, "we are close to fielding our objective procurement—about the 95% mark," says Maj. Jeff Poquette, SUAS program manager.
At this late stage, the Army plans to open its SUAS procurement to competition, awarding indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (ID/IQ) contracts to multiple vendors, then competing individual task orders for top-up buys, services, logistics and upgrades. The ID/IQ contracts will cover the medium-endurance Raven-class and long-endurance Puma-class SUAS, but be open to other manufacturers of airframes and payloads. There will also be some flexibility to purchase other systems, such as a vertical-takeoff-and landing (VTOL) SUAS, says Poquette.
The Army's plans helped fuel an explosion of small-UAS activity at the AUVSI show, which Minson eyes with skepticism. "Who is buying these things? We are supplying the majority of everything." Although AeroVironment will face competition going forward, he is confident of continued domestic and international demand for Raven and Puma, and the company is introducing new SUAS, including the all-environment Wasp AE, lethal Switchblade and VTOL quadrotor Shrike.
"When we first started doing SUAS, not much thought was given to how many should be in the force," says Minson. "We see the need for another class of aircraft, the Shrike VTOL." And more products are in development. "We will move to smaller UAS, and also go up to longer endurance," he says. But AeroVironment will stick to the lower end of the market, for now. "We see hand-launch as key," he says.
One reason for the growing popularity of SUAS is the ongoing dramatic reductions in payload size, which are significantly increasing the capabilities of small platforms. "Five years ago everyone was building an aircraft in their garage and bringing it to the show. But the platforms are settling down," says Steve Morrow, president and CEO of small-UAS manufacturer Insitu.
"Now everybody is building a payload. . . . And Moore's Law applies to payloads. It's fast-moving and exciting—it's eyewatering," he says. "Insitu is looking at 75-100 potential payloads, some proposed by customers, suppliers and technologists, and some we ourselves have conceived. Future capabilities will be less about the truck and more about the payload."
Poquette says future roles the Army is eyeing for SUAS include chemical/biological and radiation detection, signals intelligence, communications relay and base defense. Longer term, in 5-10 years, he sees the need emerging for smaller, stealthier SUAS with longer endurance and faster launch. "We want something you can launch out of a pocket and control with a screen on your arm."


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In July, a museum artwork, "Untitled" (Public Opinion), 1991 by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, will be on view at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. The artwork, which is part of the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, consists of a large quantity of individually wrapped licorice candies, which are poured directly on the floor, usually in a pile or flat rectangle, and available for viewers to take and eat. Visit ISAW to view the architecturally responsive installation of the artwork and see how it is being uniquely interpreted through the lens of the ancient world.
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Earlier Event: July 24A Call to Action at the Guggenheim Museum
Later Event: July 25A Call to Action at the Guggenheim Museum


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Saturday, November 13, 2010
Impulse! Records Gallery #1: 1 to 25
One of the main touchstones for album cover design is the Impulse! Records catalogue - or, that is to say, one of the main touchstones is 1960s jazz cover art, as best exemplified by Impulse! Records. I'm not sure that the 1960s Impulse! catalogue is really quite as revolutionary as many would have you think, but if nothing else they are certainly iconic (so much so, in fact, that their impact might have been blunted by the very extent to which they've entered the popular consciousness) and evocative of the style of music presumably held within: modern, tasteful, and most of all, cool. I think these covers are about the best visual representation of 'cool' out there.
I'm going through the catalogue according to catalogue number, not chronological order. Presumably, they're roughly the same, but inevitably never quite are. These are numbers 1 to 25.
The first one, and already the ethos is there: a great cover photograph, in this case two very hip men with their trombones and an attention-grabbing strip of yellow, and a lot of text in a clean font with different colours. The text is a bit too in-your-face, but they're getting there.
This is the Impulse! look exactly. Clever 'math' title in bright colours and a dignified font, beautiful mysterious live photo that is mostly black in colour. God knows how much black ink got used at the Impulse! printing press.
Two of the first three Impulse! albums are by a trombonist I've never heard of. This is less iconic, and kind of Martin Denny/'exotica'-styled, but it's clever, with Mr Winding's trombone quite literally in-your-face.
This potentially could be cheesy, with Gil Evans on a chair staring at the giant hole that's formed in the wall next to him. But somehow it works, with lurid reds paying no attention at all to the album title.
Impulse! could have stopped here. That blue-tinted monochrome close-up, that modish sixties text in complementary colours... this says everything you need to know about jazz album art.
A bit knocked-off by comparison. Mostly because the cover art fails to impress, I guess, looking like 'just any old photograph'. Nice colour scheme though, evoking the pan-African colours.
It wasn't easy to find a good picture of the cover for this album, perhaps because its exclamation-point-overdose title is tough to Google. Art Blakey seems happy enough, drumming in the pitch black. Happy? That's not something you see on many of thse covers.
Nice, but the approach is already slipping into cliché. This is Impulse!-cover-by-design. The results are good but not gorgeoush, and way too much importance given to record label logos (I'm guessing that garish GRP logo was tacked on later).
The obvious follow-up to 'Out of the Cool' doesn't apparently, feature Gil Evans at all except on the cover. They've patched up that red wall well enough.
More of the same, let's be honest. It's a good 'same', with Coltrane the colour of lava and nothing else but his instrument up close and blurry plus a lot of blackness. A baby blue strip houses the logo and winds up drawing the eys perhaps more than it should.
It all comes down to the cover photo, I guess. This is a beautiful, sombre, thoughtful picture, so the cover is a success. That baby-blue sure sticks out, doesn't it?
Green and yellow! Where did they come from? A very 'bokeh' picture turns Carter's sax into a mess of bright colours, but it puts some energy into a series of beautiful but sleepy covers.
Monchrome on deep black, bell of the instrument in close-up. Text in all caps with complementary colour scheme. Yep.
I had a hard time believing this was legit, since it seemed to be typeset in Courier New. Then I remembered that there used to be a thing called a 'typewriter'. Otherwise, very standard. Pretty, but standard.
It's amazing in rapid succession just how samey these are. Impulse! certainly attracted big names, though, didn't it?
A change, this time out, in that it's an illustration and not a photograph. Still, a noteworthy change. It gives the album a different feel, even if it's still monochrome with lots of black.
Interesting. Being off-centre is a nice touch. It has the 'cool' that I think some of these other covers were starting to lose, even if the text looks like it's piled up on the guy's head.
Pretty, if generic. The photo is clearly posed this time, and why not? Why have all your covers be live peformances? Otherwise, italic, yay.
Manny gets just a tiny filmstrip. This is what cheesy discount album covers looked like in the 60s, but they were presumably copying this and not the other way round. The tracklist takes up most of the cover, but it's still a nice change. Even if it's still really, really black.
Now this is cool. This guy could be a country singer, a prison inmate, or the president of France. Whoever he is, he oozes cool from pockmarked pores. Brown not black, and the numbers look nice. Like an evil 'Sesame Street'.
A pretty well-known cover. Actually it looks like very little thought went into this, but it stands out because blue is the dominant colour and black is secondary, not the other way round. Apart from that, just Coltrane in performance.
And this is lovely indeed. The cover this time is designed, not merely assembled according to specific rules. Two silhouettes look at each other in front of a red background. At first glance it looks like abstract art. Nice.
Very unexpected from Impulse! The quartet in a foret somewhere, looking lost. Very green, and way more pastoral than Impulse! records tend to be. The first cover that actually looks like it wasn't shot sometime past midnight.
Interesting for being text-based, like "Jazz Goes to the Movies" in black with a tiny photo, but this kind of looks like the dust jacket of a million 1960s books that I find in yard sales everywhere.
The last one, this time out in part one, this is a folk singer, of all things. It's a thoroughly Impulse-ised cover, though. He still looks like Woody Guthrie, but the cover's dark black and the text is in cool colours, all-caps. Fusion!
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Love The Arts In Philadelphia is a multi-faceted marketing initiative that supports many of the city's most prominent arts, music and cultural institutions. The year-round campaign provides advertising and promotion via television, billboards, radio, social media and online marketing. No other city in America has a program that supports The Arts in this manner.
The companies that benefit from the funding include The Philadelphia Museum Of Art, The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Pennsylvania Ballet, The Curtis Institute of Music, touring-company Broadway shows at The Academy Of Music, Opera Philadelphia, The Barnes Foundation, The Rodin Museum, The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, American Theater Arts for Youth, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, The Philly Pops, Philadanco, Woodmere Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Independence Seaport Museum, the Philadelphia History Museum and The Mann Center for the Performing Arts.
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Friday, August 29, 2008
On the Street…..Jean Shorts, Paris
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126 comments
awesome look! Great idea of pairing with stunning boots.
Excuse me while I do my Tex Avery-thing and pick up my jaw from the floor. :D
Hm, I'm quite tempted to say that this is a very American look, though not in a good way… No offense. I DO like the boots though!
absolutely love this. you caught the confidence of this girl well.
Wow. those boots are HOT. and i love the interplay of blues. and the shorts length is perfect!
Wow, this is a bold, bold look, especially for Paris! I think the majority of us have seen all the tabloid pictures of Britney Spears (with the front pockets protruding from the bottom of her cutoffs) to even think about attempting this. I like what she's done, though. A lot. Inevitably she pulls it off because she has long, lean legs. There is something pseudo thrown-together in her outfit. Let's see, an 80′s-style cropped jacket, cutoffs, and bootie heels: perfect example of fashion synergy where the total is greater than the simple sum. I love her shades, they remind me of a Bottega Veneta style I have seen. The gold hardware on her purse disagrees with the outfit, and makes her look like a UES princess trying to pass as a downtown gal. It sounds as if I am complaining but I really like this look. Not for the faint of heart, that's for sure! Jorge from W Palm Beach
That entire look is Trashy and Tacky – If you'd been in W. Virginia it would have never made it on to the page. Vive la France!!
This works because the over-the-top leg exposure is offset by her coverage on top. The pale boots let the length of her legs finish uninterrupted. I love the beautiful blues with black. You go girl! Do it while you can!!
If it were an American look, she'd be wearing a t-shirt with some corporate logo or funny saying on it instead of a plain black shirt and that fabulous jacket. Not sure about the boots, though. Here's one place the overused gladiator sandals would be right at home.
I am of the belief that short shorts and boots should be left to exotic dancers. Not a street look I'd like to emulate.
The clothing combines with the building that has just behind her, Perfect.
Old Housecoat nailed it. The boots make it look really cheap. AND uncomfortable
Jorts aren't my favorite. However, she looks great!
She looks fantastic. call me old-fashioned but i would normally sawn off jeans are not appropriate for the city but as anon 9:39am said her top – that fabulous jacket – balances the look along with the boots. She also proves the point that expensive accessories (her bag) let you get away with if not everything, then a lot.
I love it from the waist up. I'm not such a fan of jean shorts and white boots (separate or together) but even so, I think she pulls it off with aplomb.
somthing about the cut of these cut-offs is just not right. the line is just not straight enough across- giving us that look that some have called stripper. Also, her shirt isn't long enough.
in theory this outfit should work… it's just the pieces are all a bit OFF.
I second the gladiator sandals – I love everything about this look, and then I see the shoes and go "ughh".
she's a big model and looks fierce
I don't think this look would work on many people, only on willowy women with a model appearance.
I love how she seems to know what she can pull off and goes for it.
The boots make her look like a streetwalker from Kentucky. I like the look otherwise.
Wow. Very sexy and tasteful at the same time, although I am not quite content with the choice for shoes.
Going to Paris this autumn, can't wait.
I've always found it more amusing than sexy when women wear boots with shorts – the higher the boot, the funnier it looks. But she has some HOT legs, and the shorts work for her. Now she just needs to lose the big goofy sunglasses and put a smile on that pretty face of hers.
oh, she owns it.
HATE the shorts- cut offs are hot but she didn't get it right- and the boots aren't helping. I do love her jacket though.
She just oozes style.
Wow! That's a beautiful girl and what a gorgeous jacket! I like the combo with those shorts too, but why not going all the way towards pure originality? She could do better: I'm getting a bit tired of that hudge sunglasses + trendy booties formula. Too many girls do that, and it doesn't look genuine anymore. Wouldn't it be a good time to look for something new? Any ideas someone?
i love love love this look!!!
her boots, shorts, jacket, bag, glasses are so stylish! good casual rock-glam!
Can I just say WERK! Her attitude makes the outfit for me.
umm I dont know what to say except that I am making this my background woww
she's got legs for days.
Holy Smokes! She looks like a young Jodie Foster.
would love to have her on top!
guess I am odd-person out I love it all except the boots I think they are awful…. that's why we love the sartorialist!
No, no, no, no.
Not pretty.
I too love it from the waist up, but the denim shorts and boots look a little contrived, especially for a Parisian woman. Love her easy hair and sunglasses.
although thorough dissection of this look may reveal that its a bit tacky, i feel like this is the most effortless look thats been on the sartorialist for a while – as if she just woke up and picked some things off her bedroom floor without thinking about it at all – and that i can appreciate
Shorts and heels, especially boots, is tacky. Not only that, the shorts don't look right. Nice jacket, though.
While she is obviously physically lovely, the style here does nothing for me. Overlong exposure to this very look on teenage girls at the local mall food court may have ruined it for me.
she's freaking gorgeous!!!
love the boots with the shorts, love her hair, her mouth, her stance, her legs,etc.
this is one of the few times where i straight out do not like something. but she has good legs, so whatever.
I'd marry her!!
I like the look, mostly because of the proportions. The wash of the shorts makes them look kind of cheap though.
this is an unrealistic style for real life. that girl is a model who is likely five foot ten. most girls aren't going to have legs like her. (need proof she's a model; the girl to her right is sasha pivovarova)
mhm, if the shorts were not made up of cheap looking denim, the look would be much better. the jacket is already pretty casual-looking, together with the shorts' casualness it's just too much. Probably she chose she shorts for matching the jacket's color
The word 'tacky' has been quite a few times here. Tacky + Irony = Cool. Personally I feel the ironic elements this girl pulls off here are her beautiful face and hair, incredible legs, enigmatic sunglasses and no small amount of attitude.
Is this Maryna Linchuk?
she's hott, and i love the rest of the look, but i'm not crazy about the shorts. they look a little cheesy/slutty.
also, ever since Scott said the thing about boots that length i can't help but notice how they fall at an unflattering part of the calf.
her legs are obviously skinny, so maybe it doesn't matter for her, but once i notice it I can't help thinking that the proportions are weird.
Great look!
Cracks aside, you have to admit she looks like Michelle Pfieffer in a way. I am not a fan of the boots, she's got great legs though. Was she riding a scooter dressed this way? I hope not.–HB
This is horrible, and when is the trend of oversized sunglasses going to run its course already. I am much more interested in the sleek look of the lady in the side of the photo. To me, the main girl is boring and the shorts and boot look is way overdone.
Too retro, but she looks like she can pretty much get away with anything.
Personally, I think the clothes make her look very tacky.
to me the shorts are a bit off. echoing an earlier comment, there just is something off about them. i believe it has to do with the fringe and slant cut which make them the only "messy" piece worn here. i'm looking more for something polished to compliment the rest of the pieces. a hemmed and slightly longer short. can't decide what color though. she looks great anyway. she owns the look and there is just a confidence in her stance that can pretty much override any criticism.
Great girl, great look, EXCEPT the ugly boots.
Her model legs make the shorts work, though it would probs not work on most people.
The top part is perfect.
The boots just ruin it all.
OH, i love it! cut-offs are too sexy & i love her glasses. very sassy.
The length of the shorts seem off…they should have been shorter to get the trashy look to go with the booties. More fraying, perhaps the pocket lining showing.
I like this look from the waist up, don't mind the shorts but I think she could do better with the boots.
The colour of her sunglasses is perfect against the blue of her jacket.
I can't stand the fact that so many people come here just to talk badly about those featured on your website.
Yeah that is Maryna Linchuk, one of the biggest models in the world right now. Killer walk! But yeah, she pulls off a would be really tacky outfit off really well.
i too am a never nude.. i know all about wearing cut-offs
She looks cute,has perfect legs for the shorts but I don´t like the boots,maybe if they were another color…
wow, great legs.
Beautiful, I love the way she scrunched up the sleeves of the blazer. Not to mention the fabulous color of the blazer…
this is quite a lecherous shot for you. this picture is about her sexy legs. the clothes are irrelevant.
daisy duke is back!
As a woman, she's beautiful. The outfit is blech. Sorry but the first thing I thought was trashy American, and 80′s.
She looks so hot.
Like the pushed-up sleeves!
at first glance, i thought she was Lily Cole… very non-chalant, but chic…. ;-)
What are the black straps hanging over her hips? They aren't attached to the bag….
I suppose when you look like this girl, you could get away with wearing a potato sack…
LOOOOVE the glasses and the boots :D
I'm surprised that only one person so far has commented on her suspenders(!)Personally, its not the shorts that bother me, it's those random straps and the boots. I've never been a big fan of ankle boots, I think they hit the leg in a weird place and look kind of trashy. I like the idea though- with a pair of cute flats or even converse or something. Anything but those boots.
I like it for what it is, no complaints.
I like it. I can see how everyone sees the "teen girl" look from the 80′s and 90′s…DJ from full house.
But the truth is, she makes it modern and chic. Plus, its a great look for the "it's not summer anymore, but it's still not fall" look. Plus, it looks like it took her 5 min. to get dress. it's great.
She is truly hot. Although I am not sure about the boots – can't decide, do they look cheap or just nonchalant.
Looks like Angela Lindvall, but i don't think she does runway anymore–so it's probably the model someone else mentioned. Fierce.
jorge from w palm beach; I think they're louis vuitton sunglasses.
I love the blazer with pushed up sleeves paired with denim cutoffs. I love the sunglasses. Most of all I love her beauty. But what I don't love on anyone is ankle boots, especially loose ankle boots. Occasionally one of your all black french women pull it off, but these, I always feel are so unflattering. It's a shame really, that they're in fashion.
I just can't get into it – the whole aseasonal thing doesn't do it for me. It's like trying to wear a miniskirt and a big woolen scarf at the same time…
On the plus side, the girl is beautiful, and I covet them shades.
Some other type of short and shoe and maybe this could work, but I agree with everyone above who said boots plus cut-offs equal a very unbecoming trashy look. Brings back bad memories from a childhood spent with biker parents and their highly unfashionable friends. Just can't take it seriously.
OK I have to say it looks good, but usually I hate jean shorts… So Southern trashy… I think the reason this works is that even though they are cut-offs they are cut low enough not to be trashy… Plus she looks like she absolutely owns this look…
After much consideration, I've decided that I love this outfit, but hate the shorts. I could see it working, if it weren't for the subtly lopsided cut and fraying of the shorts — which takes it from carelessly casual to cheap&tacky. Otherwise, I second whoever said that she's pulled this off with tremendous aplomb. Respect!
YSL jacket, Chie Mihara boots?
I don't care who she is, if it had been a denim mini rather than shorts I think the outfit would have worked 100% better. However – she's making major bank, doubt she'd care much about my critique..!!!
wow maryna linchuk. i didnt know she had such great personal style, personally i adore this outfit. and i think she might actually be wearing overalls i dont know what else those straps could be
maryna and sasha!
sart, you have a dream job.
i love her jacket – very YSL last season.
in a word, "yuck."
too-short shorts with suspenders hanging down? a too-large blazer, white ugly old vintage boots and a prada purse. this whole thing is a disaster. she is trying too hard and doesn't have any identity.
I can see why a man (dare I say, any man) would find this fashionable…
Great pose and great look. I really like the fact that they are frayed rather then turned up and love the shorts-boots combo. Mind you – as usual Kate Moss was there first – here in 2007 ;-)
I think the lady on right has better sunglasses than her.
Her boots are gorgeous, but I don't think it goes with this outfit. Nice touch by rolling up the sleeves though.
Cool look! I love shorts with a structured jacket!
Hot! No need to say more.
white trash chic.
in a really good way.
A lot of girls are wearing denim hotpants in London. Unless you look like this girl – and let's face it, most people don't – it's a horrible, horrible look.
Here, it's fun and young.
This girl looks amazing, and she def knows how to put an outfit together. She is Magdalena Frackowiak, and she is wearing and YSL blazer (SS08 collections), her handbag is Prada. Yes, the boots looks awkward, but that doesnt mean she has a great style.
She really pulls off this look well–until you get down to the ankle boots. Those spoil the whole thing. Despite her beautiful long legs, they make her look awkward. She'd have done better with a pair of sandals. Just about any other style of shoe would have worked better than ankle boots.
all kinds of bad. don't like it at all. cheap cheap cheap. not to mention scale off. shorts too short w/ the jacket heavy on the top. boots bad w/ the outfit. don't like it. did i mention that?
If she weren't so painfully beautiful and young and in Paris you'd all be asking why there was a photo of a hooker from Denver here.
The cutoffs are what throw the whole thing off kilter for me. They don't make sense.
This is one of those looks where context is everything. Stick her in Dallas it would be just as applause-worthy, but the outfit would read completely differently.
indeed, it "doesn't mean she has great style" ;)
i'm sure she does, but i don't like this look. i'm SO over 80′s slouchy boots!
Pretty girl. Very tacky outfit. If youth can't make it work, nothing can.
The results of Sart's experiment are in: yes, if he puts it in his blog, no matter what it is, the majority will oooh and ahh.
I hope he will use his power for the good of mankind. :-)
The reason the jean shorts don't work is the fabric of the denim.
Why does it tent out on her left leg so irritatingly? Why is the fray just plain ol' wrong and not working?
I don't know what brand of jean she chose, but in my experience hot cutoffs only come in the form of well-worn, great fitting Levi's 501s.
Levi's denim wouldn't tent out on her jutted hip.
And when you cut and wash a pair, it doesn't fray like a frizzy little chia pet, but more like hot fringe that's slightly stringy.
To pull off the classic American cutoffs, you need more hot fringe, less chia.
Oh, here's a good example:
thank you.
Oh, and to Anonymous who doesn't like the critical comments, we're trying to save the world from less-than-desirable aesthetics. sheesh.
Wow, this is a great look!… There's enough detail and yet it still captures a certain Parisian restraint. Love it!… Bref, elle est canon!
thanks, Jessica. It was a little mistake.
Ring, ring.
Who is it?
It's the 80s calling, they want their look back.
With a body like that she could wear a multitude of flattering styles.
Are you sure this isn't a shot from a recent issue of Vogue Paris!?! This girl OOZES sex and looks very Anna Selezneva-like and that cerulean blazer is just fantastic! Bravo!
Laura 7:01, I just got up from the floor from laughing hysterically! You offer a very good point! Those boots and shorts scream the corner of Hollywood and Vine! I don't think hookers in Denver would be wearing that ultra-chic blue blazer though!
Where can I get those boots?
The woman on the right is more interesting to me. She has mystique. The model in the center looks like a Russian escort attempting a Tex-Mex look. Are the booties from Payless?
That is so hot.
I think that there is an mistakable European look to denim wearers from that continent. It is almost as though it is a caricature of Americans wearing denim. It seems to capture the Ellulian distinction between fashion and costume, with costume being the authentic style and fashion being the transitory whim of fancy.
Old Housecoat…There are stylish people in West Virginia, one reading this blog.
not a fan
Hrm…I feel the shorts are too short and light in wash.
Stunning boots ! I just cannot understand the numerous negative comments about them. I find them absolutuely gorgeous and so fashionable…
This gives me hope for my own generation… We are still holding it together.
i think i see shoulder pads in the blazer… and i like it!
She makes it work well. I like the blazer a lot. And she makes a good choice of wearing black and covering up on top since there is so much leg showing. I can see how that if this outfit were to be worn be someone who doesn't have such sophisticated style it could have been trashy.
I think shorts and an ankle boot look great. I love this outfit.
I like the girl and that is the most important thing. She kind of has a Jody Foster look to her.
I don't like the jacket and the boots.
The outfit is amazing, and obviously ahead of its time, because the shorts are cut perfectly and look perfect with the jacket and boots. But the more conservative people were not yet aware of this when the picture was taken.
Cut-offs – no; ugly boots – no, again. If the bottom had been more coordinated with the top, it would have worked.


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Happy new year, may 2014 be better than 2013. Please, let 2014 be better than 2013.
it took being drunk after a work holiday party to figure out how to fucking renew my billing information on here. been trying a few weeks onw and all of a sudden, success. yay I guess. so I'm back, and here's my ass.
A cripple walks amongst you All you tired human beings Hes got all the things a cripple has not Two working arms and legs
And vital parts fall from his system And dissolve in Scottish rain Vitally he doesnt miss them Hes too fucked up to care
Is that you in front of me? Coming back for even more of exactly the same? You must...
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alight local loves... who's going to the burlesque show next Friday... maybe meet for drinks somewhere?
I'm a little lost with this change.
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he wrote a poem
And he called it "Chops"
because that was the name of his dog
And that's what it was all about
And his teacher gave him an A
and a gold star
And his mother hung it on the kitchen door
and read it to his aunts
That was the year Father...
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