I wish. But in the meantime, there is the just released Busby Berkeley Collection, which packages together five of the visionary's greatest works: Footlight Parade (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933, Dames (1934), Gold Diggers of 1935, and 42nd Street (1933).
And it's got everything: dancing skyscrapers; gravity-defying pianos in deterrestrialized spaces; abstracted, disembodied, and dematerialized nubile bodies; ornamental, self-organizing crowds; Depression-era urbanism; hotels and arcadian watering holes teeming with pre-Code connubial bliss; Renaissance perspectives on acid; phantasmagorical stage sets; and a bitchless Bette Davis. You'll feel like singing and dancing afterwards. Marvelous!
A recent clicker-happy night on Flickr brought me to the incredible image above. Tom Rovers writes: “This temple is in the middle of nowhere, after you enter it's just a giant hole in the floor with stairs all arround.” Though I suspect it's not the temple proper but its stepwell, the self-similar subterranean hydrological architecture of the Subcontinent.
POSTSCRIPT #1: Title changed from Harshshat Mata. See comments.
POSTSCRIPT #2: Can we build a few of these stepwells atop the Ogllala aquifer? Robotized and with built-in AI computers, so that as the aquifer continues to be pumped dry, they would automatically dig down to follow the receding water table. Or perhaps even instinctively go in search of other aquifers. A landscape, architectural and infrastructural divining rod. And maybe centuries later, landscape architecture students on field trips can go spelunking through a karst landscape not unlike an Escher print. Of course, I would then wonder how deeply would they be willing to go? How much of the wilderness would they be able to handle?
POSTSCRIPT #3: Meanwhile, they would be the perfect venue for productions of Don Giovanni and Faust. As the opera progresses, the company slowly descends to the waters of the Styx below, one heavy, measured, ominous step at a time.
POSTSCRIPT #4: How about an avant-garde staging of Dante's Divine Comedy?
Because being wild — or even Nature, according to some — was never part of its program, Central Park had to put a stop to a coyote's sojourn within its precint. And so with reporters, photographers, and news helicopters in tow, New York policemen went on the hunt, finally capturing the intruder this morning. Of course, it would be an entirely different story if “Hal” the Coyote had settled just outside the park's boundaries.
Rest easy Frederick!
POSTSCRIPT #1: Another coyote article from The New York Times. Count 'em two! Two articles from the Times. Of course, they will soon be followed by a PBS special and then by an independent feature-length documentary directed by Werner Herzog. And finally a Hollywood sequel, Coyote Ugly II: about a girl's wild adventure in the big city, with dreams of becoming a songwriter, but one encounter with a tranquilized coyote changes all of that for the best and worst; the soundtrack will be awesome. So months go by, and a park ranger discovers another coyote who has somehow evaded detection all these time. And it's a female...with Hal's babies! An instant cult of Fauna Davidians is formed, rivaling Pale Male's own fan club. Hysterical coyote-watching day and night. Street vendors will start selling stuffed coyotes and t-shirts. A reunion of Hal with his mistress and offsprings is cooked up, and it will be televised live on The Today Show. Ratings through the roof! Madness! Madness! And Central Park, long the bastion of manufactured nature, will be decreed a wildlife sanctuary by mob rule, forever off-limits.
POSTSCRIPT #2: Or how about a new cable channel, sort of a cross between The Weather Channel and Animal Planet, providing current news reports and analysis at the intersection of human and animal cultures. A round-the-clock, real-time coverage of flu-infected birds entering Alaska, alligators on the prowl at a new Florida ex-urban development, the teaching of orphaned birdsthe ancient art of flying, pet hyenas and baboons, etc. And I would expect some of these stories, the migration of infected birds in particular, be treated like major weather events, “structured like narrative dramas with anticipation heightened by detection and tracking, leading to the climax of real-time impact, capped by the aftermath of devastation or heroic survival.”
POSTSCRIPT #3: Hal the Coyote died 30 March 2006. Cause of death: “heartworm infection and internal bleeding caused by his ingestion of rodent poison" and exacerbated by the “stress of captivity and handling during the release.” Poor fella.
POSTSCRIPT #4: There is anothercoyote on the loose in the park.
A detour upstream on the Ohio from the Mississippi brought me to Louisville, Kentucky. Google mapped above is the Great Lawn of the city's Waterfront Park designed by Hargreaves Associates. The grid meets topography meets infrastructure (soon meets OMA).
Inspired by Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, I went for a southbound cruise on the Mississippi River. Starting from Kaskaskia, the geoannexed former state capital of Illinois, I went in search for other traces of past geopolitical skirmishes. There were many, it seems.
One certainly feels lucky to have these Mississippian provinces culturally homogeneous and politically stable. Because what would happen if a wildly meandering river forms the international boundary of two future countries who consider the other their mortal enemy? What if after a major earthquake redraws the path of this river and the capital of one gets geoannexed by the other?
Now what would happen if you designed a park on anyone of these shifting territories, and the boundaries follow the meandering course of the river, rather than fixed to an ancient silhouette. And both sides are as heterogeneous as Israel and Palestine. You've gone for a stroll one afternoon, only to find the next day that the park had migrated to the other side, where roses are considered invasive species and fountains symbolizes the excesses and economic immorality of a capitalist society. Or capital punishment is legal on one side, outlawed on the other, and public hangings have suddenly become all the rage again. Or the frontline merely bisects the park for now.
Here are some views of a terrific site specific installation, titled Flying Carpet, by the Iranian artist Seyed Alavi. It's fifty miles of the Sacramento River, or at least aerial photographs of it, woven onto a walkway bridge at Sacramento International Airport. A beautiful pairing for sure.
And then the lights come on: why not use less arcadian, more politically charged satellite images as well?
Fifty miles of the US-Mexico border fence, for instance. Or fifty miles of the San Andreas Fault coated onto an actual vehicular bridge, say, a Calatrava. Or fifty miles of Fisk's Mississippi or the future underwater trenches of the Arbonian Sea inside the corridors of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Or how about fifty miles of the Israeli security barrier inside perhaps this very brave synagogue.
Or even less as a sanctioned work of public art and more as a mode of political dissent: the bombed out shell of the al-Askari Mosque unfurled on sites heavily trafficked by Halliburton executives; the scarred landscapes surrounding an African diamond mine on the sidewalks of Antwerp's Hoveniersstraat or New York's 47th Street; the parched terrain of Mexico City during that city's ongoing 4th World Water Forum.
TerraServer appropriated as a guerilla tactic. Google Maps as acts of civil disobedience.
I can certainly imagine scenarios in which disaffected but still idealistic students in dorm rooms or co-ops or in a badly-lit cafe preparing for a rally the following day. Seated on mismatched vintage chairs, they enter long strings of longitude and latitude coordinates into TerraServer, all abstract sets of numbers but potentially worldchanging. Then a westward, eastward, northbound, southbound scopic drive all through the night in a drone of mouse clicks. Reading the landscape, strategizing with geography. Click. Click. Click. Icarus as an anarchist. And then, with their downloaded patches of terrestrial ecologies stitched together on Photoshop, they head on out to Kinko's for a late night print run, hoping against all hope that the plotters are working.
On security design: “ASLA seeks images of poor security solutions at public buildings to aid in bringing national attention to the persistent problems of security design.”
