We're over two weeks late for Halloween, but these are some things worth sharing. Doombuggies is a lavish unofficial tribute to the haunted house at Disneyland. Amongst its joys are detailed listings of Disney's spookysound-effect LPs. There's even a site with a 25MB mp3 file (right click here) of the entire soundtrack of the original haunted house ride. Staggering.

Other faintly related things. Rebecca Caldwell's awesome Carthedral is goth auto design taken to illogical extremes, melding a VW beetle to a hybrid Cadillac hearse (of course, the ultimate hearse is still this one, courtesy of Harold and Maude, cult film extraordinaire). Other 'art cars' can be found at this specialist agency.

Emily Strange is goth consumption for design aficionados who are too old to backcomb - check out their ankle socks, a perfect Christmas gift. And finally, we highly recommend the rich prose style of HP Lovecraft, who naturally has his own culty following.
posted by things at 12:15 / 0 comments

Blogback looks well worth checking out. This link is as much an aide memoire for us as anything else. Any comments on whether it's worth it are welcome. Thanks.posted by things at 17:12 / 0 comments

Billboard advertising, church-style, courtesy of Dorina at photographica.org. posted by things at 11:30 / 0 comments

What does music look like? asks turbulence.org. The shape of song is software designed to extract geometric patterns from musical compositions. We haven’t tried it yet, but it makes some glorious shapes.

All sorts of other weirdness is going on at shift, a Japanese site of obscure ambitions. They should have stuck with the bad old days of graphic design, ably illustrated at when LPs roamed the earth - splendid Jurassic vinyl imagery within.

For actual sounds, good mp3 selections have recently been found at curve’s site, and also here, at the aptly titled twee.net. Definitely music for those of a more gentle disposition, twee.net specialise in extremely winsome English pop – check out the Mind the Gap compilation tape – mp3’d here in its entirety – for classic examples of the genre. There’s no real American equivalent to this whimsy; respected labels like K records and Simple Machines, for example, always had a punkier, hardcore edge.

Work continues apace on things 15: expect publication some time before Christmas...
posted by things at 14:21 / 0 comments

Look! A sidebar! How infuriating, for those of a perfectionist bent, especially in typographical matters, that this carefully organised list should be such a mess. Sadly, it was organised in courier, a good, old-fashioned, fixed width font. There's a lesson in there, somewhere. posted by things at 23:01 / 0 comments

tick, tick, tickposted by things at 12:34 / 0 comments

Interesting interview with Leon Krier, guru of the New Urbanist movement. Krier, outspoken as ever, describes the WTC as a "a phantom tombstone of monstrous scale", arguing that high rise buildings are obscene, fragile and dangerous. His anti-modernist stance seems to have hardened ("...one modernist building is enough to destroy the spirit even of a largely traditional scheme. The Steven Holl building in Seaside may be the best example of this."), although his remarks seem to be entirely based on the presumption that modernism is a reductive state, anti-tradition and accumulated knowledge. "It is a systematic rape of man's psychological and physiological make-up."

Surely it's time for a new definition of 'modernism'? Is it an architectural style, or a "form of radical brainwashing"? Is there a difference between modern architecture and modernist architecture? Most architects would probably argue that there was, pointing out that 'modern' means 'of today' or 'contemporary', while Modernist (the capital is optional) refers to an architecture which draws aesthetic and planning inspiration from the work of the Bauhaus and the International Style. While New Urbanist planning might yet prove to have potential, in terms of a wider discussion on the perceived social ills of the past half century, such stylistic semantics are surely irrelevant.

We had always wondered about this. Some mysteries solved.posted by things at 23:19 / 0 comments

Two highly recommended things, both of which are edible.posted by things at 22:34 / 0 comments

Speaking of the morning news, the letters is a side project by one of the news' editors. It looks intriguing, a sort of collaborative community weblog that prides itself in a minimal approach, turning the contributors' thoughts into bite-size morsels. The small-scale is easily overlooked, so perhaps it's time for another link to Paul Lukas's fine Inconspicuous Consumption webzine, the on-line presence of his publication Beer Frame (also see his excellent book). The latest musing is about green ketchup - are our colour perceptions in danger of more disruption?

The next issue of things will include some thoughts on Martin Parr's Boring Postcards, a relatively recent publishing phenomenon. The books appear to have spawned a small on-line following - with Retroglobe's collection of Swedish examples being especially well done. These collections (others here and here) are a treasure trove for the fan of the non-descript architecture of the 50s, 60s and 70s. posted by things at 16:07 / 0 comments

Those kind people at the morning news have linked to us today, complete with an extract from Elsa's recent adventures in Florida (one of the pages that's yet to be re-formatted - apologies).

Coincidentally, TMN's album of the week is Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation - a choice we would certainly agree with. Daydream Nation is quite unlike anything else, making 1989 a pivotal year in rock music. Since then, it almost seems as if nothing much else has happened...posted by things at 14:03 / 0 comments