Category: Things On The Net

The Coliseum Theater – A life in Flickr

The Coliseum TheaterKrazyDad posts about an airplane he took a picture of and commented on how soon after posting the picture, a commenter ID’ed the plane and posted links to another photo of the same plane after it had collided with another plane on the ground.

I had a similar experience late last year. On the trip east in January 2005, I was randomly driving around New Orleans, taking pictures, gawking at houses, all the usual tourist stuff. Suddenly I ran across the most amazing looking movie theater – an art deco wonder that reminded me of the old May Company building on Wilshire Blvd. here in L.A. Clearly, the theater was the winner of the neighborhood “which one of these is not like the other” architectural game and a picture was an absolute must. I remember that the intersection was pretty busy and I had to circle the block a couple of times before I could get something in focus and that’s what is over there on the right. In retrospect I should have just parked the damn car.

After Katrina, I had wondered what happened to the Coliseum and late last year I got an email from someone who ran across my photo and pointed me to some aftermath photos – the groovy facade took a heavy beating, but the building was still hanging in there. In October, some tarps went up and apparently was being restored and transformed into a studio. I hadn’t thought about it for awhile until I read KrazyDad’s post on the kindness of helpful strangers, remembered the random post-Katrina emailer and took a look.

The Coliseum burned to the ground in February of this year and Flickr is there to hold the documentation and the memories.

Update: Cinema Treasures’ page for the Coliseum.

Things I Like – “I Skipped February & March” April 2006 doubleplusgood edition

1. The online collection of the journal Design from 1965 through 1974.

2. Ansel Adams’ photos of Los Angeles.

In any case I was running a search in the Los Angeles Public Library’s immense online collection of photographs when something in a record caught my eye, the name “Ansel Adams.” The image attached to this record was of a parking lot with a cars jumbled together around a prominent No Parking sign. I don’t normally associate Ansel Adams with ironic snapshots of parking lots or small format urban photography at all. Like you, a photograph by Adams means the classic evocation of the great American wilderness. It never crossed my mind that he had photographed any of the cities of men, much less Los Angeles. But there it was. Maybe, I thought, there were more.

See the Flickr set for these.

3. The Day Britain Stopped. Another in a series of BBC’s “documentary futures” programs, this one covering the domino effects generated by an overloaded and overworked transportation network.

4. Igor Oleynikov’s blog. I’ve hit link fatigue with many of the illustration blogs lately – too much similar work that’s all above-average, but Olejnikov’s work continually gives my retinas a much-needed recalibration.

5. Nils Olav. A King Penguin who lives in the Edinburgh Zoo, Scotland, Nils was recently promoted to Colonel-in-Chief of the Norwegian Royal Guards.

Google Earth

There’s a thousand Google Earth snapshot sites, but I really like these two. This is the Rice Valley in the eastern Mojave Desert along California Highway 62. In here you can see markings from both the California Aqueduct and earlier marks from the WWII-era Desert Training Center.

Google map link

This is an abandoned housing tract east of El Paso. The streets were laid out, but the project went bankrupt before the houses were built.

Google Map link

Monday linkage – Akanksha Tillinghast edition

Three blogs that absorbed all my free time over the weekend…

In other news, did you know that in the past 18 months 36 ships were scuttled in L.A. harbor?

Akanksha Tillinghast? He/she/it spammed off my mail server over the weekend but I can’t be annoyed too much because that name is so terrific sounding.

Things I Like – “I Skipped December” January 2006 edition

1. Aaron Koblin’s “Flight Patterns” – alternative visualizations of US air traffic.

flight_patterns

 

2. Op-Art artist Bridget Riley

 

bridgetriley bridgetriley_785bg

3. The iPod edition of the Yule Log

 

yulelog_ipod

4. The second wave of retrocars, especially the concepts for the Dodge Challenger (I’ll take one in “Vanishing Point” white please) and Lamborghini Miura.

 

dodge_retrochallengerlamborghini_retromiura

5. The Friends Of Eddie Coyle. This turned up on one of the cable networks a couple days ago and annoyingly it’s not on DVD yet. I started watching it because of Robert Mitchum, who’s terrific in it, but the movie’s real star is the grimy New England industrial autumn – lots of faded overcast grey, brown, flat green, battered strip malls, faded cars from the 70s, – barely a blue sky or primary color to be found. It’s a hell of a cracking good 70s-era existential noir movie too.

friends_of_eddie_coyle

What I Like (November 2005)

1. The Fall on “Later with Jools Holland.” I kinda liked Holland way back when he was the snarky new wave guy that would randomly show up on MTV’s old “IRS’ The Cutting Edge,” but now he an old smug self-importance Paul Shaffer-type who insists upon inserting his boogie woogie piano into every act on his show. M.E.S. would just murder the guy and the Fall’s performance was indeed great, but my favorite part came at the beginning when all the guests perform together in an attempt to out awesome each other – only the Fall jump up and down like a band of sinister muppets.

fall_later

2. Mapping Toponymy. Where regional differences in name for topographical features like “hollows,” “coves,” “-burg,” etc. are actually mapped out.

hollow-gulch

3. The AMT Piranha. As seen in the Man From U.N.C.L.E. The closest thing there was to a Hot Wheels car you could actually drive.

amt_piranha

4. Big Bugs. Just what the web site says – giant insectoid sculptures.

bigbug_ant

5. Wrong Is Right. You want to give this movie more credit than it probably deserves… Middle Eastern shenanigans, dictators who suddenly can’t get the CIA to return their phone calls, suicide bombers, a president who becomes emboldened after being perceived as a wimp, a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and a media who’s only interested in which side will give them the best ratings. Add in the usual supporting cast of 80s-era parody actors (Leslie Nielsen, Dean Stockwell, Henry Silva) and it should add up to a forgotten movie twenty years ahead of it’s time and at least a short list candidate for a “in the footsteps of Dr. Strangelove list.” Well, kinda sorta. After recently watching it for the first time since it was released, it doesn’t seem quite as sharp as I remember it being but dorky comedies like this and Deal Of The Century are a damn sight better compared with the shrill pound-you-over-the-head tone of current war satires like Lord Of War.

Still, bonus points for the sight gag of Sean Connery throwing his hairpiece out of a helicopter at the end. Double extra bonus for casting a young Jennifer Jason Leigh as a child who poisons her parents for a reality show.

wrong_is_right