It’s that postcard over there on the right that started it all. A dead town east of Joshua Tree that wasn’t even that much of a town before it died. However, someone thought enough of it to commission up a “Greetings From” postcard for the soldiers who were passing through town on their way to North Africa with Patton.Some twenty-five years later I’ve got a small collection of so-called “large letter” postcards and there’s enough of us online to support the inevitable Flickr group. CreativePro.com looks back at the history of the Teich company who basically created the large letter style.
Month: June 2007
Montrose
I was just finishing up this post about Montrose when I noticed Atwater Village Newbie posting about it today too. And yeah – unlike the morass of dubious “Old Town [name of city]” downtown revitalizations around LA county, Montrose has gone directly from 1975 to 2007 completely unscathed. The signage, the store fronts, and even the businesses themselves haven’t changed at all.
The Montrose bowling alley is total Charles Phoenix bait:
I love the fonts, the glass bricks, and the two tone green but the detail that makes it is the bowling pins on the front of the planter box. I doubt that this building has changed at all in fifty years. Certainly the inside of it hasn’t.
If you go for the architecture make sure you stay for the food. Tbe “Vietnamese Fusion” sign outside Pho 21 might scare off some purists, but their pho is yummy with a strong broth and noodles that can stand up to it. Perhaps more to the point, Pho 21 is the only pho place in this part of town and I’m glad that it’s a good one.
If you need no other reason to go to Montrose, then at least go for La Cabinita. It’s one of the best Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles and the best mole this side of Guelaguetza.
Verve reuniting
A lot of questions come to mind – mainly as to whether Ashcroft has expunged all the ham and oatmeal from his system and whether McCabe will be interested enough to really cut loose. This could either be embarrassingly bad or spectacularly good. Probably both at the same time.
I’d probably be just as happy if it was one of those “Don’t Look Back” shows where they could play A Storm In Heaven in it’s entirety.
Another homebrew BMW
Unlike the 7-series convertible, this 5-series pickup truck spotted in Glendale doesn’t look it’s going to kill the occupants in a crash.
Camp Silver
QC is a big fan of vintage Airstream motels and it looks like Camp Silver on the Dutch island of Texel is a worthy companion to The Shady Dell in Bisbee. Unlike the random retrocool of the Dell, Camp Silver goes with Charles & Ray Eames as its design inspiration for the eight brand new Airstreams shipped over from the US.
[via 24oranges]
Duty Now For The Future
Following from my snark about the Buried Belvedere (which on second glance looks like it had been smothered in batter and deep-fried for fifty years), Jonson challenged me to pick out five items from today that I want to preserve for the citizens of 2057.
1) The logo for the London 2012 Olympic Games. People hate it! People (marginally) love it! And really now, would you feel better if it had freaking Big Ben on it or something? As usual, Peter Saville gets directly to the point.
“I find it a bit cheesy. Those rings don’t sit happily within that angular form and the typographic expression of London is a little insecure and apologetic. On the other hand, it’s incredibly noticable, brave and confrontational. Designs which are effective are abrasive on our sensibilities initially, that is how they work. It doesn’t have to be nice because they are familiar, while a great design forges a new aesthetic. It’s real job is to be a catalyst for awareness of the Olympics and it’s doing that alreadyâ€.
The logo reminds me of stylized Kanji that you would see on a Tokyo neon sign. I like it. I’m including it in my time capsule on the odd chance that it doubles as an Elder Sign. Hey, you never know.
2) A Cyborg Fidel Castro. Communist revolutionary to pop culture joke icon in under fifty years. I believe it’s only fair that he gets to annoy people forever. See also: the robotic Richard Nixon in Futurama. If a cyborg Fidel isn’t available, then the real Fidel will be a adequate substitute.
3) A stainless steel tablet with “COOKBOOK IT IS LOLZ!” engraved on it.
4) Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts. Out of all the five items I’ve chosen, pop-tarts have the best chance of surviving fifty years of stasis. If the future is an all-natural blissful ecotopia, then pop-tarts are the exact Molotov Cocktail of bio-psychological corruption to bring those Eloi to the darkside of junk food. If the future is something else, then pop-tarts will provide the sugar boost necessary to escape the zombie hordes. Note: the pop-tarts must be brown sugar cinnamon, other flavors are not to be trusted.
5) Rheingold. Not the beer, but the band. It’s my dream that in the future everything will be 1980 Euro-synthpop and we’ll all have synthesizers made of red, yellow, and clear lucite.
At the very least, I want to leave 2057 a forty-five minute long version of “Dreiklangsdimensionen”.
Buried Belvedere
It looks like the big unveiling of the 1957 Plymouth Belvedere time capsule in Tulsa went awry today because of an accumulated 50 years of water damage. I’ll try to avoid making some obvious jokes at the expense of Tulsa, but when confronted with a quote like “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Miss Belvedere” from an event organizer you just gotta kick out some of that denial. I wonder if anyone back in 1957 thought that those hopes and dreams of the future would amount to nothing more than a pile of toxic mud and rust.
After looking at some photos of the burial site in front of the Tulsa courthouse, I wonder if the sprinkler system for that lawn was particularly zealous? Near home, there’s some sprinklers that run so often that the adjoining sidewalk never gets dry, even in summer.
Schrödinger’s Capo
(Sorry Erwin.)
A mobster is a Jersey diner at night with his family and a plate of onion rings. Also in the diner are potentially one or more Enemies. Over the course of dinner the mobster may recognize an Enemy, but with equal probability he may not recognize an Enemy or no Enemy may be present at all.
If the state of the mobster may not be determined from outside the diner without interfering with mobster/Enemy system then is the mobster in a superstate where he is both alive and dead?
It could explain why that cat was hanging around Satriale’s.
Thinking about the ending on the way to work today, I remembered John Sayles’ film Limbo and it’s very similar and jarring non-ending ending. The film just stops without any apparent conclusion until you suss out that the plot of the movie wasn’t necessarily the story. Family relationships are the story and once those relationships reach some kind of resolution there’s no reason to keep going. The series really ends when Tony visits A.J.’s therapist and revealed that he was still the same whiner he was seven years ago – blaming his mother for everything and taking responsibility for nothing despite all the subsequent death and horrible things he’s done. The family (both of them really) isn’t much better off, each acting as enablers for the others. The scenes that followed were just epilogue. Holsten’s isn’t too terribly different from the small-L limbo Tony encountered as Kevin Finnerty at the beginning of the season only he’s still afraid, paranoid, and waiting for something to happen.
Whaddya gonna do?
Countdown to when Paulie/LOLcat mashups appear in 5… 4… 3…
The Best Book Cover In The History Of The World
Between this book cover and a recent saturation of Life On Mars viewing I’m ready for a crash course in British crime trash.
[via Warren Ellis]
Grand Theft Auto: Hill Valley
Copy/pasting from the description page:
Back to the Future: Hill Valley is a full conversion Mod, being made for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. BTTF: Hill Valley will allow the player to re-experience all the great moments from the films. It’s the modders goal to not stray too far from the original story line; while still adding in new content to the game that enhances the game experience. You can relive one of the best movies of all time, in the outstanding game play of the Sandbox hit, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. This mod is sure to bring countless hours of fun to anybody who enjoyed the movies.
Some of the Features that will be in BTTF: Hill Valley are:
- 5 different eras of Hill Valley: 1885, 1955, 1985, Alternative 1985, and 2015.
- Played in Real Time
- New Vehicles to correspond to the times.
- New Pedestrians to correspond to the times
- Instant and Realistic Speed Based Time Travel
- New Effects and Graphics
- Flying Hover mode for the Cars and Trains of the future.
- Refueling feature for the plutonium chamber/Mr. Fusion unit on the Deloreans
- Gas Stations
- Custom Radio Stations
- Reenactments of scenes, from the films
- Remote Controlled Deloreans
- Build-a-time-machine garage
- Working calendar
The mod is only at Version 0.2b, but crimony the release of this could be the one thing that pushes me over the edge to pick up a console or whatever could play it.