Pasadena: Then and Now

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

In 1888, the city of Pasadena, CA built an opera house at a cost of $125,000 ($3.15 million in 2012 dollars). The design used the Moorish revival style, which was very popular at the time. The building was razed in 1926.

PasadenaOpera

The Royal Laundry building, which replaced the opera house in the 30s, was built by Gordon Kaufmann, the same architect who designed the Santa Anita racetrack and Los Angeles Times building. The Royal Laundry complex was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

A Firecracker for Today

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

GardnerFirecracker

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Posted in Books Publishing and Writing, Sex, Women men and fashion | Tagged | 8 Comments

Happy 4th of July

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

Land of the free, home of the brave!

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Posted in Politics and Economics | Tagged , | 7 Comments

“Straw Dogs” (2011)

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

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I was a little wary about watching Rod Lurie’s remake of “Straw Dogs.” Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 thriller is a genuine landmark — one of the most notorious, controversial films in movie history, and for plenty of good reasons, most of them having to do with Peckinpah’s unique gifts, viewpoint and sensibility. (It was one of those hard-to-sort-your-feelings-out-about ’70s movies, like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Dirty Harry,” that really divided audiences and got people arguing. When’s the last time a new movie gave you a decent excuse for a good argument?) Lurie’s a talented director, but what could a remake of “Straw Dogs” possibly have to offer? It’s not as though the material or the plot were the major sources of the original film’s fascination. For better or worse, it’s “a Peckinpah film” before it’s anything else. Plus I had my usual anxieties about whether the remake might spoil my memories of the original.

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Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

The Propaganda The Corner ATM Machine Is Selling

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

This month in Diversity at the corner ATM machine:

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How do so many people who champion diversity and multiculturalism persuade themselves that they’re radicals speaking daring, defiant truth to the cruel powers that be? Diversity and multiculturalism are the status quo.

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Posted in Photography, Politics and Economics | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

New Blog Features

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

In our eternal quest to keep our visitors entertained and provoked, we’ve come up with a few new features.

Because one of my great pleasures in life is passing along cool links, but also because I don’t want to clutter the joint up with too many of my own damn “Linkage” posts, I’ve created an updating-in-real-time box of ’em. You can follow my ongoing web adventures by looking at the right-hand column. Down a bit, past “Recent Posts” and “Recent Comments,” you’ll find “Paleo Retiree’s Linkage.” Check that shit out.

To make finding the interviews that we’ve done as user-friendly as possible, I’ve created a page with links directly to them. On it I’ve also provided links to interviews that I did back when I was blogging at 2Blowhwards. Lots of great stuff there to be explored.

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“The Hands of Orlac”

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

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Directed by Robert Wiene, the 1924 “The Hands of Orlac” takes the psychological emphasis of Wiene’s “Caligari” and gives it an undertow of pained Germanic romanticism (among other things, it’s a fever dream of emasculation). Conrad Veidt plays Orlac, a famed pianist who loses his hands in a horrific train crash. Experimental surgery gives him the hands of a killer — or so Orlac believes. And before long Orlac himself is driven to kill. Or maybe he doesn’t kill: our understanding of events depends on which frame of the narrative we’re occupying at any given moment. Veidt is hypnotic. Peeling back the layers of his cool, fin-de-siècle beauty, he makes his moonbeam eyes and marionette frame seem wracked by a will that is not his own. The more delusional he becomes the more his hands seem alien to his arms — like heavy stone transplants from Paul Wegener’s Golem. When he gets really worked up his veins bulge and throb in tune to the tortured acrobatics of his psyche (the performance is a triumph of vascularity). Veidt’s contortions probably wouldn’t be so effective without the counterpoint provided by the luxe, expansive settings. Inverting the flat fussiness of “Caligari,” Wiene stages much of “Orlac” in deep space, using shadows and pools of light to emphasize the vastness of his minimalistic sets. (The art direction is by Hans Rouc and Stefan Wessely, the cinematography by Hans Androschin and Gunther Krampf.) The approach calls to mind Dreyer’s “Michael,” made the same year, and it looks forward to both “Mad Love” — an “Orlac” remake — and portions of “Citizen Kane.” Here, when combined with Wiene’s use of long takes, it serves to heighten the macabre suggestiveness of the narrative. Wisps of meaning fester and dissipate as your eye probes the compositions.

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Eyesore of the Month: Carlos Slim’s Museo Soumaya

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

Although it’s almost two years old (hey, gimme a break, I’m a little slow), I just discovered that billionaire crony capitalist Carlos Slim has built a museum in Mexico City to house his fine art collection.

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First, let us praise Señor Slim for giving back as admission to the museum will be free. Even if it’s in some way a monument to his ego, that doesn’t negate the fact that its 66,000-pieece collection — including works by Dali, Picasso, Da Vinci, Renoir, Miro, Van Gogh, Matisse, Tintoretto, and El Greco — won’t tangibly benefit the public.

Now that that’s out of the way, the building is a hideous piece of crap. Designed by Fernando Romero (Slim’s son-in-law) with engineering assistance by Frank Gehry and Ove Arup, the structure looks like a severed appendage from T-1000 or a disco ball that’s morphing into a butt plug.

Building-as-sculpture, blobitecture, an anti-human façade that contemptibly refuses to address the surrounding environment — check, check, check. And how expensive will it be to maintain all those shiny tiles over the years?

The antiseptic white gallery.

LAR /Museo SoumayaWell, OK, the hardwood floor is nice and adds a little interest. I guess we should be happy they didn’t go with concrete.

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Posted in Architecture, Art | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Design Coincidence?

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

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On the top: the design for Apple’s new headquarters. On the bottom, the headquarters of Britain’s GCHQ, an intelligence agency that does electronic surveillance and is said to have links with PRISM.

Are giant circles the shape that the Matrix naturally tends to assume?

Posted in Architecture, Commercial art, Photography, Politics and Economics | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Hey SSM Proponents, The Christian Wacko Paranoiacs Have A Point

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

The Facebook page Gaytheist described this as “The Christian Right’s paranoia complex in a single tweet:”

fischertweetI’ll admit this guy is indeed just a wee bit paranoid because pedophilia and bestiality are easily distinguishable from same-sex marriage or polygamy as the former involve a lack of consent or coercion. So, calm down dude, they’ll remain crimes for the foreseeable future.

But, using the majority’s reasoning in U.S. v. Windsor, please explain to me why a ban on SSM is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, but bans on polygamy and marriage between adult siblings are not. If the state cannot regulate the sex of who I marry, then explain why it should be permitted to regulate the number.

When I last discussed this issue with classmates back in law school, the vast majority of whom were and are SSM supporters, they would roll their eyes or throw up their hands and make some crack about marrying a duck. Some of them, with a lack of irony that practically knocked me over, would express disgust at the idea of a man having multiple wives! Regardless of their reaction, though, they completely avoided the issue. Apologies to my friends, but a refusal to deal with the blindingly obvious logical consequences of your position is intellectually dishonest.

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The best reason not to fear a polygamy legalization movement is a practical one: The Cathedral and its like-minded acolytes don’t like Mormons. The only group that could conceivably generate the kind of groundswell necessary to legalize polygamy are our brothers and sisters in Utah and they’re just kinda icky and silly, right? Magic underwear and all that. Indeed, when I asked a friend today why the Supreme Court’s reasoning shouldn’t be applied to polygamy, her response was, “I don’t give a fuck about Mormons.” Precisely. The only difference between her and the majority of SSM supporters is her blunt honesty.

This is not to say that any of us here at UR is a closet polygamist. God, no. One woman is headache enough.

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Posted in Politics and Economics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 19 Comments