John Menick

The Colossus of Baghdad.

The implosion of the Stardust in Vegas is an occasion for a mini-museum of hotel demolitions.

The Stardust

The Aladdin

Desert Inn/Wynn Parking Garage Implosion

A fascinating archive of (mostly) abandoned US airfields compiled by Paul Freeman. The above photo is the first helicopter flight simulator, also featured on the site.

* “Shoot all scriptwriters,” he wrote in his popular, long-running Village Voice column, “and we may yet have a rebirth of American cinema.”

* “The original plan for the film was that every shot would be digitally placed over archival footage. So that literally, the film would be “shot” in 1945 Berlin; the actors would be green-screened over archival. There was a scene in a butcher shop, for example, and I had to find every camera angle we needed in a butcher shop in 1945 Berlin. If there was a scene outdoors, a destroyed park or a zoo, I had to find those camera angles. There was interplay between the writing, directing, and archival research: what I could find that was in Paul Attanasio’s script, and whatever else I found in my research that might work or that piqued Paul’s interest, or Steven Soderbergh’s… A colleague of mine in the art department, Joanna Bush, created an amazing database of all the footage I’d collected. It was organized based on the geography of Berlin. So that on Steven’s computer, he could click on a map of Berlin and it would find all the archival footage that I had gotten on a particular plaza or a particular street or a particular location, and pull up all that archival footage and all the stills. Steven could know where he was situated in Berlin, and the art department could recreate a particular strasse. We’d know the ruins and we’d know how much that area was bombed out and all that.” More…

* “My first exposure to the subject came in a book by another medical anthropologist, Margaret Lock, whose Twice Dead (2002) is a brilliant comparative anthropology of Japanese and North American attitudes to brain-death as the criterion of death. Hence the title: a person is ‘once dead’ when technical criteria establish that the brain has stopped, while the body is still ticking over quietly on a ventilator; ‘twice dead’ when the heart is stopped and the organs harvested.”

* “What, he wondered, did we want to do? Did we want to eat, to drink, to fuck? Uh, dinner sounds cool.”

* And last, but not least, the Athanasius Kircher Society 2006

As it describes itself:

Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice.

My video The Disappearance ends with a passage discussing how factory locations are often used as the setting for the closing scenes of sci-fi films and thrillers. Most of the photographs in this portion of the video are of the coal mine in Essen, a site I learned about for the first time while researching the piece, and since then have seen in several other books and Web sites concerning the history of factory architecture and film.

Over at David Byrne’s blog (yes the David Byrne) there is an in-depth entry on the Essen site. Byrne scouted it for a film he was working on in the late 80s, and returned there recently for a concert. The site is the location for Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s “Palace of Projects” (pictured).

Also related to my video is Byrne’s discussion of the Essen site as a place where “two world wars were ‘made,’” making it an obvious target for allied bombing. Despite the assault, the factory recovered and operated until in the mid-1980s. And then?

Thomas W. tells us that the Chinese wanted to buy this entire site when it closed — their own coalfields are not entirely depleted — not just yet — so they can actually reanimate this creature. As this Essen colliery/cokery was the last one in the area to close the local government hesitated approving the sale, and decided instead that their glorious industrial past should be remembered, memorialized rather than obliterated and forgotten, so they declined that particular offer. They call them industruialkulture monuments. Cathedrals of Industry. Other nearby sites had been sold in entirety to the Chinese — in Dortmund a similar site was completely dismantled and shipped to China. Hundreds of workers were shipped in, housed in tents on site, meals and facilities provided, as they took the beasts apart. How did they do it? We gaze at the tangle of pipes around us, the huge metal machines that dwarf human scale. How could anyone keep track of the parts? Where would you begin? The scale is like ants taking a car apart and then reassembling it — and hoping it works.

Open Democracy has a short essay by Jason Orton about his photos taken in the abandoned underground UK bunker, Turnstile. Interestingly called a “cold war city” by the photographer, Turnstile was to server as a gigantic safe room for the UK government in the event of a nuclear war. (Via Subtopia.)

Something to do this Labor Day weekend. From Art in General:

Help launch the eteam’s departing flight from a historic and fully operational, but dormant airfield in Brooklyn. Play a role in an eteam film- be the passenger, the pilot, the engine, or the fuselage of a plane as it exits from the gates of historic Hanger B. Learn the history of Floyd Bennett Field, New York’s first airport and now a Gateway National Recreation Area by participating in a guided tour by Linc Hallowell, a historian and park ranger of the National Park Service, who will introduce you to the airfield’s peek moments, its decline, and the process of renovation that is underway. The afternoon winds down with a BBQ.

Admission fees:
$10 (includes tour, transportation not provided)
$20 Art in General members (tour and transportation on shuttle bus from AiG to FBF)
$25 (tour and transportation on shuttle bus from AiG to FBF)

Shuttle departs from Art in General, 1:00pm

RSVP to 212.219.0473 x29 or anthony AT artingeneral DOT org

Organized by Art in General in collaboration with Floyd Bennett Field

This program is presented in conjunction with:International Airport Montello

Looking for a pro geodesic dome? Pacific Domes is your answer, and ZDNet has a profile. From the article:

The company started in 1980 after [Pacific Domes owner Asha] Deliverance had been living in a monastery and built a rudimentary dome using Fuller’s geometry because she needed a place to live.

Quickly, she learned that others wanted them. So she ended up building a dozen. That turned into a business.

Flash forward to 2005 and the devastated Gulf Coast region, where relief workers in Biloxi, Miss., and in an area of New Orleans were using domes donated by the company as distribution centers for food and equipment.

Also: Best of Friends: R. Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi at the Noguchi Museum (May 19, 2006 – October 15, 2006 ).