10.31.2004
Halloween Good, Unprepared BAD!
Hell, I was again not ready for Halloween. This is truly a shame as each year I fritter away August 1st thru October 30th ruminating over just what my costume might be. Unfortunately for my ultimate happiness, this time of year I’m often thigh-high or neck-deep in the midst of any other important thing. The result: little ol’ Halloween takes a back seat.
Although: not all was lost for 2004. As a last minute attempt to stave off the neighborhood gangs, Ms. Lynn and I cut up pumpkins and laid-out candy.
Forget answering the door, we live on the third floor of a walk-up. Instead we left the candy bowl on the front steps with a polite note asking the literate to take only what they could carry. Lynn refilled the damned thing every half hour for about two hours and that was that. We suspect that at least three kids left with goods.
Please don’t think me crass for my flip attitude toward the youth of today. In my time I was well known for attempting to steal the tires off your Chevy if I didn’t like the candy you were offering. I guess the night was simply my way of giving back to the community.
As for the pumpkins, mine was inspired by some dumb-ass quick sketch done on the back of yesterday’s newspaper while aficionados of Japanese art will notice Lynn rendered a perfect Yoshitomo Nara http://www.sweatyfrog.com/nara.html
Let there be no question as to the artistic merit of this household.
Be Well
dannyboy
The Ennis-Brown House:
I first came across the house in an English publication Bridge for Design. It tends to be a stuffy magazine highlighting what the English will think is novel or American. Regardless, the magazine's photos of The Ennis-Brown House were great; much better then those on the House's web-site, from which this photo was taken.
So what kind of house has its own website: one built by Frank Lloyd Wright, listed as a national treasure, recently added to the World Monument Fund's roll call of the 100 most endangered cultural heritage sites (because a 1994 earthquake nearly destroyed it), and used as a setting for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
I have always liked the movie Blade Runner and it was immediately on my mind while skimming through the magazine, prior to reading the article or visiting the website. It was nice to read there was a relation between the film and building as I have long felt the same unsettling notion about the cultural results of Blade Runner and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Blade Runner, as with Wright's work, set forth ideas which have become visual standards/formulas for their respective industries, even though the typical practitioner gives little credence to origin of the thinking which produced the visuals.
Case and Point in Two Illustrations:
Movies: The Matrix Trilogy
Architecture: Any number of bad Neo-Prairie Style developments in the Greater-Chicago Area (details to follow).
Enter here my long-winded thoughts on the following topics:
1. The depth of the Existential argument
2. What Wright meant in saying: "No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other."
3. What the fuck was the hopeless, heroin junky, god-freak, sci-fi guru Phillip K. Dick really after?
4. Wright's time in Japan, a country which seemed to have perfected all his ideas centuries before he bothered to visit, before returning to America and becoming a really cocky fuck.
The rest of this is babble. Its always been. I'll not sort it out here. I'll simply let the above act a reference for some future ramble.
10.26.2004
Yes, the World is cyclical and so I shouldn't care: but, I'm just glad I never published the damned travesty of a play I wrote by the same name. Bad writing is bad enough but having ripped the title from a "B-Grade" film from the Thirties would have been too much to stomach. I do like the poster though.
AND FUCK YOU!
untitiled
Layered Lamp #13 selected to the MDF Competition
sponsored by Design Within Reach & Ten by Ten Magazine.
