Travel Brochure Graphics, revisited / Grey Room, a place to escape from / a mobile crane simulator / David Guy's website highlights self-curated delights like The Pointless Museum, an self-declared portal of ephemera, Throttling, 'an archive of comic book throttles', and the celebrated Ladybird title 'How it works: The Computer', scanned in its entirety (related, Douglas Keen's obituary) / highly recommended, The Morning News Annual 2008.

Referrer mining. the whole buffalo says some nice things about us / always pleasant to be sidebarred, this time on RAR / Books Covered / the Flickr Friends of The Twentieth Century Society / thanks to an earlier anonymous comment for pointing us to Brokers with Hands on Their Faces, contemporary studies of despair / Barbie beats on the Bratz / the British speaking clock is now sponsored by Tinkerbell. Accurist have taken themselves online after 22 years.

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 documentary posted in its entirety. Highly recommended (via me-fi). See also the new book from Actar, The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, edited by Kazys Varnelis. Varnelis was recently found asking where is the good new architecture?, a question that wasn't answered especially satisfactorily / The Planet X Saga / a selection of guilty reading / kottke on the first mall, a little bit of Gruen history / 'various resources and links to articles related to North American syllabic writing systems' / an Audi brochure from 1939, rather unfortunately pitched at week-ending Nazi officials.

Lapland UK 'is NOT and never has been in any way associated with Lapland New Forest'. And now the news that Lapland West Midlands has also failed to live up to snowy expectations. Shades of Flamingo World (at 4m10s). 'Disappointing theme parks' is a flickr group that has potential / flickr sets by Unexpected Bacon / Dallas Clayton has the air of a Stateside Shrigley, although no doubt he would love to mimic the latter's marketing acumen / mentioned in passing in the last post, the entire Diary of a Nobody, as rendered online by Kevan Davis / a real nobody, the Stranger in Alexandria / it's depressing that the plummeting American car industry should be dragging down the carefully cultivated niche brands bought around a decade ago, plundered for technical information, and ultimately stripped of prestige.

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Getting a lot of linkage, Star Wars: A New Heap, 'Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Death Star', John Powers' visual essay at Triple Canopy (linked via me-fi, k and KK, amongst others). In summary, George Lucas's Star Wars brought the aesthetic of the 'used future' into the mainstream, painting the technology and culture of an uncertain tomorrow (although the films were actually set in a distant past) as a bastardisation of the sleek minimalist/modernism of the Empire. This ad hoc world, where everything is greebled to within an inch of its life, is deliberately contrary to the quasi-fascist aesthetic of the Galactic Empire ('a slapdash world of knuckleheads pursued by industrial-scale minimalists'). It's tempting to suspect that the entire essay was triggered by the surely intentional visual parallels between the Death Star and OMA's RAK Convention and Exhibition Centre in the UAE.

Nonetheless, the essay effectively juxtaposes images of the minimalism of post-war American modern art with the Empire aesthetic, and that of 2001, a utopian impulse on an epic intergalactic scale that has more in common with the fantasy Berlin of Albert Speer than the dusty spaceports and rusty ships ('a flying saucer had never been a slum before'). Ultimately, Lucas's vision became culturally dominant, and the post-post Banham-era Los Angeles of Ridley Scott, a neon-soaked, rain drenched city awkwardly retro-fitted for a tomorrow that arrived too fast, continues to define the image of the modern dystopia. The art and work of the original minimalists evolved into a formal critique of the automated megalomania of the military industrial complex, culminating in works like Michael Heizer's 'City' (previously mentioned). Here we have an artwork that combines the aesthetics of modernism, minimalism, and eclecticism, fulfilling the visual predictions of both Kubrick and Lucas and yet somehow even more mythological than any fantasy world they ever dreamt up, thanks to its remoteness and almost legendary status.

Labels: architecture, linkage

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