Idle Cataloging

It occurs to me that dinosaur rock and its immediate descendants produced a number of rather beautiful songs on the topic of selling out. Taking a fast look at my iTunes: Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, Backstreets by Bruce Springsteen, The Garden of Allah by Don Henley, Hotel California by the Eagles, Middle of the Road by the Pretenders, World Leader Pretend by R.E.M., The Other Side of the World by the Rainmakers, Once in a Lifetime by the Talking Heads, White City Fighting by Pete Townshend, Eminence Front by the Who, Bell Boy by the Who, Who Are You by the Who, In A Hand Or A Face by the Who, 5:15 by the Who. Townshend deserves special credit, in my opinion, for perfection of the lyrics in the last two.*

I’m not sure that this is even a phenomenon, let alone one I can analyze. I may simply be seeing a pattern that exists in my own head. Or, there may be more songs of this ilk and an explanation. Any thoughts?

*”Ain’t it funny how they all fire a pistol / at the wrong end of the race.” and “Where have I been? / Out of my brain on the five fifteen.” are as good as it gets.

Not Meant as a Comparison

While tornadoes were killing hundreds of people in the south this week, the northern fringe of the storm was less severe. All we got in New York was driving rain and high winds.

The appearance of the storm, however, was straight out of bad sci-fi:

No Respect At All

I shelved this before the trip, thinking I might need it, and yet here it is: disrespect towards a bear.

Here’s a Hint

There’s a reason why everybody makes fun of the ever-proposed, never-built Xanadu shopping mall. IT’S IN THE MIDDLE OF A FUCKING SWAMP.

For those not from the area: the New Jersey “meadowlands” are a huge swamp in the valley shared by the Hackensack and Passaic rivers, slightly north of where they join to create Newark Bay. There’s a reason the land is “available for development.” IT’S A SWAMP.

Cool picture from two weeks ago

“Heroes,” They Say

Motherfuckers. And yet I am certain that there will be WTC first responders who will still be willing to be used as props during the upcoming election.

Government Regulation

Hey libertarians! Check out the paradise on earth that results when good capitalists go Galt on evil regulation.

Actually, I have more to say to you and your cult: the reason that regulation exists is that this type of shit used to happen all the time, because there are always landlords willing to play russian roulette with someone else’s life. I know that reading Ayn Rand has rotted whatever brain you once had to the point where you need a drool cup, but see if you can draw a line from the starting dots of a landlord ignoring regulation of egress and wiring standards to the end result dot of three people dead.

Scheduling Genius

We got home at 9 last night. I’ve got 982 emails automatically moved to the “vacation” folder. I’m giving a webinar at 1 PM.

I Hate Flying

I also hate every fucking thing about flying. More later: we’ve been in transit for 15 hours.

An International Embaressment

Even thought you’re American tourists, and therefore known far and wide to be idiots, you are not actually required to dress as if you were slow children. There’s a reason that gym shorts and zoris are worn on the beach: they’re poorly suited to the city.

Damn

I’m good at visualizing buildings from drawings and photographs. I’m better than most architects and engineers I know, and much better than people not in the field.

Some buildings have to be seen to be believed. We spent the morning at Sagrada Familia.

Oops

Despite the fact we were in Madrid at the beginning of the week and are in Barcelona now, we had nothing to do with this. (Alt link for the NYT-impaired.)

Adaptive Reuse

What do you do with the big train shed when you renovate the station? At Atcocha, they turned it into a really nice greenhouse, with the new station immediately adjacent.

Calle de Valverde

We’re in a nice hotel, on a quaint and narrow side street off the Gran Via. The quaint and narrow side street has, after 7 PM, quite the selection of tranny hookers. We haven’t spoken to any of them, but they seem to be eying Mrs.__B suspiciously.

41 N

New York and Madrid. In case anyone was wondering about the effect of the gulf stream.

Two Cultural Differences

1. Taxis in Madrid are white with a diagonal red stripe, making me wonder when the coast guard got into the cab business.

2. Graffiti in Madrid, roughly translated: “Kill all the bankers.”

Lucy: The Elephantine Symbol

What, if anything,does Lucy mean?

Robert Venturi – an architect more famous for his theorizing and writing than for his design work – came to the conclusion that the aesthetics of buildings can be divided into two categories: decorated sheds and ducks. A decorated shed is a building in which ornament or ornamental design twists are applied to the plain building that would have been built if no one was thinking about aesthetics. The craze for Roman-temple banks in the U.S. in the 1890s created a lot of buildings that are basically rectangular prisms but have a lot of columns, and acanthus leaves, and acroteria, and cornices, and water tables, and other pigeon-landings bolted on.

A duck, on the other hand, is a building where the overall design cannot be separated from the aesthetics – where ornament is integral. The name comes from the (B^4 fave) Long Island Duck. The Duck is a fairly simple one-story building, and I’d argue that Lucy is more of a duck than the Duck is. Lucy’s structure is far more complex that it needs to be for no reason other than to imitate an elephant’s legs. The Duck has the edge that ducks are long-time residents of Long Island (which explains the nasal accent), while elephants’ connection to the Atlantic City area is limited to circuses.

Ultimately, the problem with a Venturian analysis is that few have any reason to care what the conclusion is. Lucy is 130 years old now, at which age she can be forgiven for a lack of usefulness, some skin problems, and being famous simply for being what she is. I’m a fan of useful buildings – not a surprise in an engineer, I guess, and also one of the reasons I avoid FLW – so I wouldn’t tell anyone to go build an elephant-shaped house. On the other hand, I will defend Lucy against all criticism.

Break A Marshmallow Leg

Why? WHY? WHY?

More Obviousness For The Oblivious

Email legalese is meaningless.

I’ve long toyed with the idea of creating an insane small-print disclaimer and putting it at the bottom of my emails. “If this email is read by anyone other than the intended recipient and said unauthorized reader does not apply electrodes to his scalp to erase the memory of the email’s contents, he will be considered liable…”

L’iL Canal

I’m not sure I understand the craze for making little versions of reality, but it’s reached Canal Street. As an occasional patron of the arts, if this work does not include tiny fake Rolexes, it has lost me.