The Onion Skewers This Blog (sort of)

There's an article up at The Onion that neatly skewers the whole concept of looking for beauty in the ruins of modern America. The headline pretty much sums it up:

Artists Announce They've Found All The Beauty They Can In Urban Decay

"These modern ruins speak to the very heart of the human condition, but at this point every last inch of Detroit and Oakland has been documented in photographs, on film, or as part of a multimedia installation," said artist Devon Gerhart, who told reporters that devoting so much time to contemplating the wounded grandeur of blighted cityscapes had led him to the point where he just wanted to see the places cleaned up.


Point, taken, The Onion; from here out I'll just post cemetery pictures and articles about Día de los Muertos.

Beautiful Pics of a Creepy Abandoned Amusement Park

Over at the Love These Pics blog, there's a great essay of photos from the abandoned Six Flags New Orleans amusement park. The pictures are all beautiful, and capture the feeling of exploring a place once full of the promise of family fun, but now more suitable as the setting for a zombie apocalypse. Beautiful, creepy, pics, taken with the help of a little urban exploration? Sold!

"landschaft mit haus" on Flickr

A series of illustrations that, to me at least, look like an Edward Hopper landscape realized on an Atari 2600. This is not a bad thing - these are amazingly beautiful minimalist works. Take a few minutes to click through the series and see if you don't find yourself feeling the "melancholic contemplation" the artist talks about.

Urban Decay on Flickr

I've spent the past two weeks working on a steampunk(ish) production of The Canterbury Tales and haven't even been updating Twitter or Facebook. I've got some posts for C/B brewing, but they'll take a while to get up at this rate. In the meantime, please enjoy this slideshow from the Urban Decay pool over at Flickr:

The Disintegration of Gary, Indiana

Artist / photographer David Tribby has documented decaying and abandoned theatres, schools, and churches in and around Gary, IN.

A slideshow of Mr. Tribby's work can be found at his Flickr page.

He also has a book available: Gary Indiana | A City's Ruins.

Phantom Images of the Everyday

I love love love the "City of Shadows" series of photographs by Alexy Titarenko. Long-exposure shots of St. Petersburg, Russia that turn dreary urban scenes into fantasickal landscapes populated by billowing shadow-creatures.

At my first glance, the photos called to mind the "smoke monster" from the TV series "Lost." (Is that still a show?) But considering the nature of the photos - single still frames documenting the inevitable passage of time - I wonder if this is how a Tralfamadorian might see the world.

Read more at BLDBLOG (a site you should have bookmarked anyway). According to Titarenko's site, a book of the series was published, but I have yet to locate a copy for sale online. So it goes.

Dead Can Dance

I first heard Dead Can Dance over a winter semester during which I lived on campus. Winter Session students were housed in a high-rise dormitory so sparsely populated that many of us had entire floors to ourselves. The one class I was taking wasn't all that demanding - a Phys. Ed. credit I needed to graduate - so I spent a good bit of time either walking the campus grounds or up on "my floor" reading and listening to music. A good friend who managed a record shop slipped me a free copy of  "Into the Labyrinth" over Christmas break saying, "I'm pretty sure you're going to like this." She was right, to say the least; I just about wore out the tape during the first few weeks I owned it. I still have that cassette, but "Toward the Within" has since become my favorite album, and "Rakim" is still my favorite track.
Fun fact: Brendan's singing "in tongues" for most of the song.