Chris Burden, Metropolis II
You may recall the kinetic sculpture Metropolis II by Chris Burden. The work, which took four years to complete, features 1,500 Hot Wheels diecast cars and a host of electric trains all bustling around a matrix of steel and plastic. If that sounds like a snapshot of your morning commute, you’re not alone.
Burden recently sat down with directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman for a quick chat on what’s behind Metropolis II and what it means to the artist. Those of you in Southern California may be able to see the exhibit in person at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the fall of 2011.
Jason’s been tracking Chris Burden projects for a while now.
A Talk with Blaine Dunlap
In March [Unfair Park] screened one of the greatest films made in or about Dallas, director Blaine Dunlap’s 1973 Sometimes I Run, about Stanley Maupin, who worked for the city’s Public Works Department flushing downtown’s streets in the wee small hours of the morning. Some Friends of Unfair Park said they’d seen it before, in high school long ago or in a sociology class at SMU. For most, though, the blue-tinted black-and-white short was brand new, a riveting revelation — 21 minutes’ worth of downbeat cinéma vérité, Pennebaker rolling with the Public Works Department as his leading man played country Kerouac.
And a couple of weeks ago, Unfair Park’s Robert Wilonsky published this feature on my dear long-time friend Blaine: Sometimes I Direct: A Talk With Blaine Dunlap, Who Once Captured Dallas Better Than Anyone.
don’t park in bike lanes in Lithuania
The mayor (above) finds it irksome.
from the moderated comments
Dallas needs to stop being so lily-livered about the event that defines it. Okay, we’re the City of Hate. Yes! That’s us. We love to Hate. I love how our Roller Derby league calls itself Assassination City. It’s perfect.
You know something, the people this offends are all old and stopping buying anything a long time ago. We need to bring in people with money who are interested in that very colorful phase of our history and cater to it, DAMMIT!
I’ve written articles on this for D Magazine. go to my website and read them
Don’t Forget the Motor City Lawndale
I was looking at pictures of Detroit (from my Flickr friend Jan Normandale and from the archives of the Reuther Library at Wayne State University), and now I have to stop looking for a while.
I’ve visited Detroit a couple of times, and in truth there’s a lot I like about it, but I can’t think about it anymore. This afternoon I’m recollecting a blisteringly hot afternoon in Chicago, late July, when I thought to avoid the expressway and take a parallel route down Roosevelt Road to where I was going.
Read more
if the world’s population lived in one city
(via @mattyglesias)
from the comments
If there’s any bereaved (but not saps), I hope that they’d get together and have some talks. I’d like my body to get picked over for usable parts and the rest disposed of thoughtfully and with as little expense as possible.
Also, a heroic nude bronze on horseback in downtown Houston. With the penis scaled down appropriately, in the interest of decorum.
from the comments
When I think back on those times the image that comes to me is the first views from the air of the Jones compound with the litter of bodies all about it, spilling off walkways, in heaps at the edges of buildings…. Later, when I saw the produced accounts and assembled footage of the history of the cult and its end, I tried to conjure in my mind the mental landscape of the place. How could so many mistakes converge so gradually as spell doom for many people? Memory took me back to a time in the ’60s when, in my mid teens, I lived on the street for a few months on Sunset Strip in LA. The hopes and fears of desperate people make them ripe for a bleak harvest. The radical individualism that sent people to a life on the streets was no match for hunger and pain and a constant bland sense of inescapable anonymity, and the hard swing back to conformity for the sake of survival lacked the benefit, in most cases, of historical perspective or critical thinking. I remember, among those people in LA, just how close everybody was to a sense of the miraculous: suddenly word would get out that 2,000 donuts had been donated to The Digger’s Creative Arts Society over near Hollywood & Vine, and the limping and shambling in that direction would begin. Also, vague news of drug busts in the works and headed for us added a tang of fear to the air, with many quick glances passing between people, and everybody watching for some sign that a rush for exit was about to begin.
Everything is written by the survivors, riding somehow above great tides of loss. Does anybody learn anything in time for it to help them? Perhaps not so often as we think we do.
two days in Los Angeles
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gas Station
The town of Cloquet, Minnesota plays host to the world’s only Frank Lloyd Wright gas station.
In the early 1930s, Wright began developing concepts for Broadacre City, a city spread out to the point where it would be ‘everywhere and nowhere,’ kind of like what we would eventually call ‘suburbia.’ The design for the Lindholm gas station came directly from this conceptual project, and it was built in 1956. The station remains open and fully operational today, and it’s currently getting restored to its original condition.
Click through for a link to a video of some of the station’s details.
(via @coudal)
Why not now?
My Dallas friend Steve tipped me to a photo of a Dubuque ghost sign, a faded advertisement for Uneeda Biscuits that I’m certain I’ve seen (though I may be confusing it with another, a sign promoting Bull Durham tobacco).
And I remembered my favorite ghost sign ever. It was in Chicago. Maybe it still is, but it’s no longer visible, perhaps obscured by recent construction. I saw it every morning as I rode the El to work downtown at the Harold Washington Library. The hand painted sign read:
Why not now?
That is all.
Why not now?
Once I stumbled upon a possible clue to the slogan’s significance, but I can no longer recall what nor where. It may have been connected with a long-gone bar or tavern.
But I’m not sure whether I really want to solve the mystery.
from the comments
I remember a time (and I bet you do too, Deron) when you could walk through neighborhoods in Austin and see several people playing guitars on a porch with lots of dogs ranging about in the yard. And the music would be good, and they would be intent on its making, but would nod as you walked by, and only later would you see them performing on Austin City Limits.
Cork Cobh, Ireland
The Bradbury Building
Another thing Amanda did while I was in Los Angeles was give me a tour of the city that was both incredibly personal and instructive. The most amazing moment was how she handled taking me to The Bradbury Building. It almost feels unfair to describe it — so you can get a glimpse of what the experience was like — because that’s the opposite of how she handled it. She just said, I’m going to take you by The Bradbury, and we parked, and then we walked in.
Marfa Turkeys
A delightful thread from Marfa’s version of craigslist.
quick note
I’ll be in LA tomorrow through Tuesday.
Dallas Bike Plan
Have any of the Dallas flockers been following the Dallas Bike Plan project? What are your thoughts on it?
from the comments
What I would want to try and convey is what I think of as the Vegas Paradox — how if you’re sensitive to the various layers, it strikes you that Las Vegas is the most honest city in America, the place where you can cut through all of the bullshit. Therein lies the Vegas Paradox.
Brooklyn Torch Open Call Line
Hello Clusterflockers!
I’ve been working hard at founding the Brooklyn Torch, a local paper currency project based in Brooklyn, NY. We’ve had a few local events and we have met some challenges and opportunities with a degree of success and mixed-success (always forward, never straight!) We are working on a mission statement and future goals and overall ideals. I’d love to hear what you guys might want to know about the project. I.e., what the hell are you talking about? Or, what is the internal rate return for investing in a project like this? Or, what does the bill look like? You know, anything. As I draft and come up with language on what we are, I will post semi-non-regularly here and at our project site. Just letting you know, there’s more on the way. For now, our lines are open. Call up and ask!
How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City’s Dark Side for ‘L.A. Noire’
Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game’s developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.
The Flea Marketing of New York
“I’m always amazed by these groups of cool young people, wandering around, looking for stuff, and I think, ‘If you didn’t have this venue, your performance of yourself wouldn’t be as complete,’ ” Professor Prokopow said. He described the phenomenon as “I have something that no one else has. I was different before I got this fantastic blank, but now my differentness is borne on my shoulders.”
The New York Times looks at nostalgia, self-curation, and the city’s flea market moment.
from the comments
So, Scott would put his little baggie of Vienna Sausages and cheese on the windowsill of the Chelsea where he was staying, closing the window onto the top of the bag. That way it would stay cool, like he liked it. But every morning he’d raise the window and the bag would fall down 7 flights to the ground. And Scott would say God Damn It.
quote out of context
If everybody is where they want to be, no one is going anywhere.
headline of the day
NJ woman chides NYC smoker, gets stabbed with pen
Sidney Lumet
From the NYT:
It is tempting, from the safe distance of our self-satisfied, smoke-free 21st century metropolis — where the crime rate is still down and property values and Wall Street profits are rising again — to impose a perverse, rosy halo on the bad old days. Among cinephiles, the habit of romanticizing the movies of the past is even more deeply ingrained. In both cases what has taken hold is a hazy myth of authenticity: especially in the ’70s, we like to imagine, the movies were more realistic, and New York City was more real.
No doubt Mr. Lumet, who died April 9, was a realist. The vigor of his best films and the hectic energy of the city they capture are undeniable. To watch those movies in sequence and with some sense of history — as opposed to an antiquarian, fetishistic attention to clothes and haircuts, cinematographic techniques and vanished neighborhood landmarks — is to encounter an episodic chronicle of societal unraveling. Some characters may cling to an idealized picture of the past, but they tend to do so out of fear and anxiety, as their hopes for the future fray and collapse along with the mores and values of the place they call home.
