Photograph by Seth Browarnik

Photo Courtesy The Bass

Photo courtesy of The Cultivist's Instagram

Photo courtesy BFA

Photo courtesy Anne Spalter

Photo courtesy Jared Siskin and Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

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-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Once again, as our nation deals with Trumpism, Bruce Springsteen's poetry and prose can bring courage. When returning to the United States in 1982, I was stunned by the way the Reagan administration had sped up deindustrialization, expanded the arms race, escalated the dirty wars in Central America, and ignored the first signs of AIDS. My best friend had just bought Springsteen's newly-released Nebraska but he had been waiting for just the right time to ceremoniously open the album and share the first-listen. Reassurance was found in his words, "Man turns his back on his brother, he's no friend of mine."

And, yes, the "Boss" continued to provide the wisdom and inspiration that helped guide us through Supply Side Economics, Iran-Contra, the crack and gang years, followed by the War on Drugs and, in general, Americans retreating from the values that had made our democracy great.

Years later, we were challenged and comforted by Springsteen's "The Streets of Philadelphia," "American Skin," "The Rising," and his recent incorporation of music that drew from Pete Seeger to Irish balladeers and New Orleans jazz to help us grapple with bigotry, the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina. As we come to grips with the Trump election, Springsteen's autobiography, Born to Run, may contain more insight into the roots of our political crisis than anything I’ve read.

Springsteen starts with the "Pax Americana" of the 1950s. Speaking for so many Baby Boomers, he begins his life story, "Here we live in the shadow of the steeple, where the holy rubber meets the road, all crookedly blessed in God's mercy, in the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, race-riot-creating, oddball-hating, soul-shaking, love-and-fear-making town of Freehold, New Jersey."

Working class kids (or, at least, white youth) during "the American Century" were "destined to live the decent hardworking lives of their parents ... if they could scoot through these years of wild pounding hormones without getting hurt or hurting someone else." Bruce was acculturated into a value system where you "remain true to your crew, your blood, your family, your turf, your greaser brothers and sisters and your country. This was the shit that would get you by when all of the rest came tumbling down."

However, Springsteen doesn't romanticize the so-called "Greatest Generation." Despite all of his family's and neighbors' strengths and the cross-cultural fertilization that he experienced, when his family migrated to California, his mom's first words were testimony to the segregation that also pervaded American life. She asked at the gas station, "Where do people like us live?"

Fans who parsed Springsteen's lyrics for insights into his relationship with his father will not be disappointed. As Bruce would explain before singing "The River," Douglas Springsteen had his son's hair cut while hospitalized in the wake of a motorcycle accident. A veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, his dad taunted him saying that the army will make a man out of him. When Bruce came home from a secret trip to the draft board, however, and said that he had failed his physical, his father was typically tight-lipped when revealing his true emotion, "good."

Springsteen would then sing, "I come from down in the valley, where mister when you're young, they raise you up to do what your daddy done."

Not surprisingly, given the number of references to radios in his lyrics, Springsteen finds multiple meanings in the "radio days" of his youth. The radio was more than a "CB-cult cross-cultural outreach" allowing hungry hearts to come together across hundreds of miles of the night sky. It was a hands-on tool for experimentation. Just as Bruce's grandfather wired and soldered electric wires and filament, and sold rebuilt radios to poor black harvest workers, his mentor, "Tinker," could redesign "anything at all, patch it up, jury-rig or jimmy it back into working order." When "the Apocalypse rolls back the clock to year zero, you'll want and need only Tinker at your side."

The radio stories are more than nostalgia about "Yankee ingenuity." They were grounds for frontier-style experimentation and the improvisation which is an essential component of the education needed for self-rule and for reinventing ourselves for the 21st century. Between the lines, Bruce is recalling the need for a post-modern means of self-expression to replace the hands-on inventiveness of the industrial era. By the time Springsteen found his "adult voice" in Darkness at the End of Town, he clearly was wrestling with the way that deindustrialization was undermining hope. I had not realized, however, that his previous album, Born to Run, was not about teen spirit but about the threatened spirit of our democracy in a post-frontier, pre-globalization era. Springsteen describes the reasons for both of those transitional albums:

I was a child of Vietnam-era America, of the Kennedy, King, and Malcolm X assassinations.

... Dread - the sense that things might not work out, that the moral high ground had been swept out from underneath us, that the dream we had of ourselves had somehow been tainted and the future would forever be uninsured - was in the air.

With Born in the USA, Springsteen became the poet of the people at a time the extreme segregation by economics replaced de jure segregation, and became joined with de facto segregation as the original sin of our new post-industrial world. The Boss knew he was now a "fortunate son," but he felt accountable to the people he'd grown up with. His discovery of Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie, combined with travels west into the new frontier where Hispanics followed in the path of the "Okies," inspired a new series of masterpieces.

"The Ghost of Tom Joad" helped crystalize the issues of the 1990s multicultural frontiers. Springsteen started with his personal need "to know where my family, my grandparents, my mom, dad and sisters - fell in the American experience." He told the tales of folks who felt "weathered, wiser but not beaten." Springsteen "traced the stories out slowly and carefully." He "thought hard about who these people were and the choices they were presented with." Even as the hope of working people declines, his lyrics insisted that they and we must shun escapism. Appropriately, the hope he sought was found in the writing of "Across the Border."

We are now paying the price of too many people in America and other nations failing to face up to "the weight of our unsorted baggage." It became "heavier ... much heavier," and "with each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher."

As Springsteen wraps up his story, he explores his battles with depression, as well as his relationship with his father. His dad taught him the "blue-collar narcissism of 'manhood' 1950s-style. An inner yearning for isolation, for the world on your terms or not at all. ... The distorted idea that the beautiful things in your life, the love itself you struggled to win, to create, will turn and possess you, robbing you of your imagined, long-fought-for freedoms." But, his father was more than "another chaos-sowing schmuck." Bruce was determined that "the sum of our troubles would not be the summation of our lives together."

Springsteen's genius is the way he shares these quests with his audiences. "I work to be an ancestor," he affirms. He pursues a story with no end that "is simply told to your own blood until it is passed along to be told in the blood of those you love, who inherit it." As his story is told, it is altered, creating "the rebirthing seed of renewal, a different destiny ..."

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The glut of information being produced online and shared across social media has given rise to the “Fake News” phenomena. When it is not flat-out lies, fake news is usually opinion masquerading as journalism, designed to sway attitudes or just bring in site visits. Was the most recent presidential election in the United States tipped by the sharing of fake news across the web? Is that possible? Before you blame the blogs, contrarians might fire back that the establishment media regularly delivers opinion as fact in tilted coverage. Few ever admit that the “unbiased” media is on their side. The left points to the corporate structure of mainstream media and the right points to the high percentage of media employees who vote left of center. But everyone agrees that fake news, be it clickbait or prosletyzing by other means, is a threat to the very social order we all enjoy.

The next time you are in a museum, though, ask yourself if the importance of the works on display are there because of the actual merit of their maker, or if they are the fake news of the creative class. In contemporary art, there is a shell game of would-be Bernie Madoffs building empires out of flipping unknown artists for twice or more of the original purchase price. These days the artists caught up in these huckster vortexes are usually earnestly imitating some art historical variant of blurry abstraction in their studios. One way to increase the value of these (or any other) artwoks is to get it shown at an institution, preferably an important museum. We want to believe that museums base their selections of what to show on something quantifiable and merit-oriented; We are comforted, then, with art history, a narrative of why each picture on the wall fits in there. Yet if the history of art is any indicator, art history is an organic construct that changes often with scant justification for the choices of who is included and who is left out. This fluidity is cyclical at times - just follow the auction prices long enough and you will see artists ebb and flow. When we go offline and enter art spaces, is there any guarantee that the art history we are being presented is just fake news?

Beyond the speculation that one could bribe their way into contemporary museum collections with the right shameless peddler of snake-oil-on-canvas, look back a little further... the justification for inclusion in the collections of museums is that the artist “is important in art history”. Artists with technical skill and quantifiable talent are often “not important” to the narrative of art history… or so we are told. How does the narrative of art history go? Scratch the surface and it is often summarized “this artist is important because he influenced that artist” and to make it less boring, “this artist is important becasue he reacted against that artist”. That’s it? No, there is a third, voluminous category. The plaque on the wall of the museum with utter gibberish. While the former two here are weak arguments that a little scrutiny might reveal as fake news, the latter here, shameless artspeak, is so purposefully indecipherable that one can safely assume one is being lied to about the validity of what is on the walls. Would museums perpetuate fake news as art history to include friends and business partners in their collections? Perish the thought (but it probably happens every day).

Museums are a lot like Washington DC, but with better fashion sense and whiter walls. Art History is often fake news used to talk down to the masses with a comfortable fable that encapsulates the interests of the institutional class. The proper term for art history, therefore, is propaganda. If they were honest about this, wouldn’t it at least sound like a much sexier major?

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"More and more people now evaluate the importance of art, not from a perspective of what's entertainment and what's merely superficially titillating or entertaining, but from the perspective of finding what is going to reach down into your core and lift you up on those days when you feel at your worst. What's going to remind you that there is something deeply beautiful, powerful, and trustworthy in you, your human journey and the world."

"Some art is a direct connection to the divine, and allows us direct access to feeling the depth of what life can be. I'm not drawn to every kind of art. Like all of us, we're drawn to certain kind of foods, certain kinds of music, certain kinds of art, and I know what I like in all three. The art that really matters to me is the art that drives me to a profound sense of connectedness and feeling. When I walk into a space and encounter art that opens my heart and touches my soul, that is a significant contribution to humanity, in my opinion. From my perspective, that is the highest purpose art can serve- to uplift and inspire humanity, to touch our souls, to open our hearts and remind us what matters most."

"It's profoundly beautiful to see that many people come and appreciate art, I love it. It inspires me to see what art can do to enliven a city. Public art provides a sense of place, carrying the flame of culture, of a community's ideals. The parks and public spaces come alive. The artwork we see every day impacts us, even in subtle ways, inviting us to be our better selves. There's a fragile nature to our petty fears and mundane preoccupations, but as we grow through that fragility, we find our true strength and resilience - more than we imagined possible. And in finding that strength, we come together. That is the power of art. Sometimes we just need a push, a reminder."

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One of the great bon vivants in the history of the Los Angeles underground has died. Jim Fittipaldi, 59, was struck by a massive heart attack on Saturday, December 3, at his home in Florida. He had left Los Angeles about six years ago but the transformative changes to the semi-industrial neighborhood he left behind make it seem like it has been fifty years since his departure.

An artist with a touch at caricature so deft that he elevated the medium to high art, Fittipaldi’s notoriety and legacy rests as the proprietor of Bedlam, a prominent underground club in what is now the Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles. In a universe of fly-by-night operations, Bedlam under Fittipaldi’s direction lasted well over ten years in a few incarnations all within a few blocks of the Traction Avenue epicenter of the former warehouse district.

Bedlam was, first and foremost, a bar. That there was no liquor license and the party raged well past California’s mandatory 2:00 AM last call were part of the attraction. Conversation was privileged over music, appealing to a clientele with personalities. Rotating art exhibits adorned the walls and for six years an offshoot Bedlam Gallery of Jim’s in Los Feliz on Hillhurst served as a midpoint for Westsiders to be invited to the gallery’s afterparty in what was then the still-scary then-empty warehouse district in Downtown Los Angeles, ridden of its first generation of trustafarian artists by the call home from mom and dad after the 1992 Rodney King riots.

As the nascent residential push in Downtown Los Angeles waned about then, Fittipaldi was one of a new generation of Downtown residents without the embossed Cal Arts degree... but overflowing with creative approaches to getting the rent paid. His solution, regularly-scheduled parties, inevitably with the theme of art, as the cavernous spaces that bore the Bedlam name always carried a who’s who of who was left downtown when the deluge of the 1980s receded.

Bedlam proved that the ugly exteriors of the warehouse district were actually decent infrastructure and that the allure of an expertly-curated atmosphere would attract people from all walks of life. That Downtown Los Angeles now hosts dozens of nightclubs proves his prescient vision. But there was only one Bedlam and no nightspot carries the vibe that balanced quiet speakeasy and howling time like Bedlam. Of course, being illegal, the open presence of narcotics as well as smoking allowed inside brought out the sense in visitors that there was nowhere else to go, that the best spot had been found, that the only possible destination was home to bed or out to breakfast as the sun rose. An immaculate dresser, there was an assumed dress code emphasizing classy with Jim himself partial to nostalgic vintage wear. Nooks and crannies made for great make-out spots when the couches were occupied.

That he passed away on the same date as the Oakland Ghost Ship artist collective tragedy is an eerie coincidence. Bedlam, though a refuge from the sameness of L.A. nightlife for artists and seekers of all stripes, was no collective. There was never any doubt whose speakeasy it was, who curated the art, who pocketed the money, who showed you a good time, who opened his doors to outcast Los Angeles. There never seemed a single safety hazard there, what with one man taking full responsibility; perhaps a last lesson this inimitable impresario leaves us with as he departs for Happy Hour on a higher plane.

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For Architectural Digest, by Nick Mafi.

It's almost impossible to imagine New York City without such landmarks as Central Park. Yet, were it not for a mid-19th-century bill enacted by the state legislature calling for more than 750 acres to be allocated for the grounds, New Yorkers would've never been able to experience the spoils of the iconic park. But what about other would-be landmarks that, for reasons political or other, were never realized in New York City? The new book Never Built New York (Metropolis Books, 2016) explores that very topic. Included in this tome are unbuilt projects such as a beautiful Park Avenue skyscraper by Zaha Hadid; a design for Brooklyn’s Dodger Stadium that featured a giant dome to shield players and fans from the rain; an airport perched on steel columns 200 feet above street level, spanning from 24th to 71st Street and Ninth Avenue to the Hudson River; and many others.

"The drawings in this book . . . are for me not a compendium of nostalgia, regret, or opportunities missed," writes architect Daniel Libeskind in the book's introduction. "They are, on the contrary, drawing the open mind to rethink the built and unbuilt." Indeed, by looking at old projects through a modern scope, we are better able to learn from past mistakes when designing future structures. Here, you will find a sampling of the scrapped projects the book examines.

The book's cover image shows Zaha Hadid's design for a skyscraper on 425 Park Avenue, one of several entries in a 2012 competition eventually won by Foster + Partners.

Although The New York Times gushed over Moshe Safdie's bold design for the city's very own version of Habitat 67, noting that the plan was breaking "just about every housing and building rule, precedent, practice, custom, and convention,” the project never took root.

Plans were in place for Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao to have a Manhattan sibling. But after the events of 9/11, the world economy turned downward, and funding (and enthusiasm) for the ambitious project evaporated.

In December 1945, prominent U.S. real-estate developer William Zeckendorf proposed a radical design for New York's next airport: a $3 billion elevated runway that would stretch 144 square blocks along the Hudson River (from 71st Street to 24th Street). The plan for the airport, which would have rivaled LaGuardia for total plane capacity, was eventually declined.

Roosevelt Island, the 147-acre strip of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, was once intended to house several 50-story apartment buildings with built-on platforms containing schools, shops, and recreational space. The design was scrapped in favor of a much more modest design, which included smaller apartments and nothing more.

More from Architectural Digest:

126 Stunning Celebrity Homes

Inside Jennifer Aniston's Gorgeous Beverly Hills Home

Go Inside a $53 Million Private Jet

Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady's Incredible L.A. Mansion

22 Incredible Indian Palaces (You Can Stay At

Tour the World’s Most Luxurious Submarine Superyacht

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Cherry Jones in 'The Glass Menagerie'

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Jan Fabre at the opening of Knight of Despair/Warrior of Beauty, State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

Apparently, Billy thought, he lived now in a trite landscape. Deep enough below the everyday, Billy realised with something between awe and distaste, a thing has power, moronically enough, because it's a bit like something else. Want to hex up briars, what else should you throw behind you but an old comb? All it took was a way with such cute correspondences.

- China Miéville, Kraken, p. 244

one of the bone-monks before installation

The monk-like figures I have been working on have their origin in my writings about a fluid body, a body consisting exclusively of blood. I have been thinking about what would happen should our internal skeleton be projected outward and become an external skeleton. One consequence would be that we could no longer be wounded... These ideas have led me to the use of human skeletons, which I acquire in India and Leuven and saw into thin slices that can be sewn together. These slivers have the visual characteristics of Bruges lacework, a transparency of sorts.

- from a sculpture.org interview with Michaël Amy

installation view, Jan Fabre, Knight of Despair/Warrior of Beauty, State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

installation view, Ai Weiwei, Laundromat, Deitch Projects, New York

installation view, Jan Fabre, Knight of Despair/Warrior of Beauty, State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

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