PEOPLE AS PIXELS Choreographing Crowds to Create Images by
Peter Hall
MODERNIST MALICE Hollywood’s Lexicon of Visual Style by
Andrea Codrington
WHO OWNS HISTORY Archiving the Internet by
David Womack
art culture design
designed by Genevieve Howe, Molly Stump, and Ananya Tantia
printed at The Village Copier
CONTENTS 22
Lists Dominate Visual Culture Alice Twemlow
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Vegas Visits The Midwest Sara Cameron
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Jackets Required Alexandra Cardia
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First Things First Manifesto 2000
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Beige Andrea Codrington
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Whitewood Under Siege Jacob Hodes
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Interview With Wes Anderson
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The Orchestra
Terry Gross
George Prochnik
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Guide To Arts Week NYC 28
People As Pixels Peter Hall
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Who Owns History David Womack
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Modernist Malice Andrea Codrington
Lists: From the (a) Trivial to the (b) Deadly Serious, Lists Dominate Visual Culture by Alice Twemlow The 21st century is full of lists: they appear in magazines, on advertising billboards, in business presentations, on the Web, in literature and art. Though they are seductively easy to read and apparently provide a way of getting to the ‘essence’ of a subject, do we lose something by reducing valuable (or not) information into a series of bullet points? In recent times, the editors of slick style and popular culture magazines have increasingly taken it upon themselves to reduce the world and its riches into bite-size chunks. As a result, lists — and specifically hierarchical ones — have evolved into a new super-species of lazy article. The economics of the epidemic are simple. The supply of ‘the world’s most exclusive spas’, ‘badly dressed men’ and ‘the best rock anthems of all time’ is endless. And, in a consumer society obsessed as much with the language of consumption as it is with actually buying things, the demand is certainly there.
According to Folio, a US magazine industry journal, ‘best of’ list issues of magazines tend to be bestsellers. The proliferation of lists in magazines results from a collision of conditions: dwindling editorial budgets (when you are paying by the word, conjunctions seem superfluous), the popularity of search engines such as Google that allow editors to generate lists in infinite combinations, and the aesthetic appeal of a neat vertical story that provides the illusion of order and completeness. A list, especially one that ranks or categorises, can be a salve for the anxiety of living in an era of information overload. But the relief is short-lived. Listing the options is not the same as selecting one of them to stand by. Unless you have something to say with your list, the experience of both its creation and use ends up being hollow.
And I Thought Church Was Fun: The Midwest Gives a Vegas Girl a Run For Her Money by Sara Cameron
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It was only a short trip — a vacation, an exploration, an investigation into the heartland. I didn’t think that six days in Branson, Missouri, would be enough to win me over. After all, I spent 16 years in the original cultural wasteland of Las Vegas — it was a little difficult to comprehend the mechanisms of a Las Vegas wanna-be that seeks the glory of being an Entertainment Town without relying on the aid of gambling, prostitution, white tigers, or anything open past 10pm. But Branson beckons millions beyond those (like myself) who seek to decipher the American mystique by crossing through hell and high water (a torrential downpour over Memphis) to reach this jewel of the Bible Belt. I found its true cunning to lie beneath the bright lights and second-rate entertainers that lure caravans of recreational vehicles driven by seniors from around the Midwest. This Missourian Mecca, where good Christians come to let their hair down to the rockin’ melodies of Bobby Vinton, held a secret seductiveness I wanted to decode.
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Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as referring to “a protective (and usually decorative) paper cover placed around a bound book, usually with the title and author’s name printed on it,” the phrase “dust cover” or “dust jacket” was first used in the late nineteenth century. The earliest dust jackets, dating to the 1830s, encased the entire book. Their primary function was as protective wrapping, which means that many nineteenth-century dust jackets were disposed of or lost after being removed from their books.
Jacket Required by Alexandra Cardia
One of the earliest-known dust jackets was recently found at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. Hidden in an assortment of book-trade ephemera purchased in the 1890s and never fully catalogued, the worn and faded piece of paper imprinted with black ink had long been separated from the volume it encased, an 1830 gift book entitled Friendship’s Offering. Literary annuals were richly decorated volumes, bound in silk, leather, or glazed paper, and designed to be given away, particularly around the holidays. Dust jackets, such as the one at the Bodleian, ensured that the gift reached its recipient in perfect condition. Such a dust jacket is more accurately described as a wrapper, “protecting the book from handling damage (which could include dust).” Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as publishers began to employ more durable bookbinding materials, the need for strictly protective wrappings diminished. The sober, utilitarian cover gave way to the dust jacket as advertising vehicle, culminating in the vivid graphics, stylized fonts, and “special effects” such as embossing and metallic inks that today scream from bookstore shelves everywhere. Branson’s remarkable celebration of mediocrity offered me a deluge of culture shock that will remain with me until the end of my days. The elements of which it seemed most proud were those that would have been laughed out of the state of Nevada for their amateurish proclivities. I was astounded by the sub-par excellence of Shoji Tabuchi, the Japanese bluegrass fiddler whose showcase of the most base features of show business somehow makes Wayne Newton’s recently penned 10-year contract in LV seem sensible. Then there was the sense of regional pride for the “World’s Largest Banjo” at the all-you-can-eat pizza and salad restaurant. Now, I know from overblown spectacles, and let me tell you, that banjo… it ain’t that big. Yet through some miracle of psycho-cultural subversion, some deeply rooted sleight-of-hand, I loved Branson from the bottom of my Southern Nevada heart. I spent my days at Silver Dollar City, a God-fearin’ amusement park with a pioneer theme, over-dosing on Kettle Corn, cover/oct
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a truly delectable popcorn concoction with both salt and sugar that Bransonians devour in frightening proportions. It’s no 50-cent shrimp cocktail, but that Kettle Corn sure is good. My nights were whiled away at Jimmy’s Keyboard Lounge, one of Branson’s few true watering holes, watching the proprietor (you guessed it… Jimmy) passionately emoting via his Hammond B-3 organ. This was not your everyday piano lounge. Listen up, Vegas lizards — this guy had mirrors behind his organ pedals and patent leather shoes. The man was not playing around, and this, dear readers, is the kind of thing that won me over: the untainted experience, the sheer underthe-top-ness of it all. The Branson “Strip” has its fair share of neon and a notion of the “bigger equals better” concept that makes Vegas great, but it possesses an innocence that shines through the façade. During my brief stay, the Pandora’s box of the Missourian enigma was not completely opened up to me, but my teenaged companion 23
on the Silver Dollar City log ride offered me a glimpse of the key. It was at this point when I realized that my sense of self and my Las Vegas experience were my only notions of reality, and they were being slowly undermined. Her statement, although bordering on the surreal, instantly secured my appreciation of the Branson mystique. “I love it here!” she cried, as we were about to be hurled to our dampened destinies. “I mean… I thought church was fun, but this is great!” Who needs Vegas? This is living.
First Things First Manifesto 2000
We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many designteachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it. Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession’s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best. Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse. There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools,
by Jonathan Barnbrook Nick Bell Andrew Blauvelt Hans Bockting Irma Boom Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Max Bruinsma Sian Cook Linda van Deursen Chris Dixon William Drenttel Gert Dumbar Simon Esterson Vince Frost Ken Garland Milton Glaser Jessica Helfand Steven Heller Andrew Howard Tibor Kalman Jeffery Keedy Zuzana Licko Ellen Lupton Katherine McCoy Armand Mevis J. Abbott Miller Lucienne Roberts Erik Spiekermann Jan van Toorn Teal Triggs Rudy VanderLans Bob Wilkinson
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television programmes, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help. We propose a reversal of priorities in favour of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication — a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design. In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart. ‘First Things First Manifesto 2000’ was published in reaction to ‘First Things First’ (1962), written in London by Ken Garland and signed by 21 other visual communicators. The aim was to stimulate discussion in all areas of visual communication — the changing relationship of a dvertising, graphic design, commerce, and culture posed some profound questions and dilemmas that were, and still continue to be, overlooked. Today still, many young designers have little conception of the values, ideals and sense of responsibility that once shaped the growth and practice of design. The profession’s senior figures, who do, are for the most part quiet. It is time to reassert these considerations as fundamental to any sensitive interpretation of graphic design’s role and potential.
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Beige
Whitewood Under Siege
by Andrea Codrington
by Jacob Hodes
There are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the United States1W.They are in the holds of tractor-trailers, transporting Honey Nut Cheerios and oysters and penicillin and just about any other product you can think of: sweaters, copper wire, lab mice, and so on. They are piled up behind supermarkets, out back, near the loading dock. They are at construction sites, on sidewalks, in the trash, in your neighbor’s basement. They are stacked in warehouses and coursing their way through the bowels of factories.
Beige is the color of evil, or at least that’s what Aaron Priven thinks. Priven, the author of the Internet’s only website dedicated to that most unassuming of hues, writes: “Most people think if colors have attributes such as good or evil, that the color of evil is either the red of arterial blood gushing from a wound, or the deepest black of the darkest night sky. While these are certainly evil colors, they are not as evil as beige…. The most evil color has to appear benign.”
The magic of these pallets is the magic of abstraction. Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a “unit load”— standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century. Studies have estimated that pallets consume 12 to 15 percent of all lumber produced in the US, more than any other industry except home construction2.
Apple Computers, one of the most obvious progenitors of the consumption-as-rebellion method of advertising, has position of distanced itself from decades of cranking out what tech aficionados disparagingly term “beige toasters.” An interview with iMac designer Jonathan Ive on Apple’s website even bears a headline that read “Sorry, no beige” — thus shifting blame from the company to the color. (Interestingly, when German designer Hartmut Esslinger first created the original Macintosh in 1984, the company lovingly referred to the beige box as “Snow White.”)
Some pallets also carry an aesthetic charge. It’s mostly about geometry: parallel lines and negative space, slats and air. There is also the appeal of the raw, unpainted wood, the cheapest stuff you can buy from a lumber mill—“bark and better,” it’s called. These facts have not escaped the notice of artists, architects, designers, or DIY enthusiasts. In 2003, the conceptual artist Stuart Keeler presented stacks of pallets in a gallery show, calling them “the elegant serving-platters of industry”; more recently, Thomas Hirschhorn featured a giant pallet construction as part of his Gramsci Monument. Etsy currently features dozens of items made from pallets, from window planters and chaise lounges to more idiosyncratic artifacts, such as a decorative teal crucifix mounted on a pallet. If shipping containers had their cultural moment a decade ago, pallets are having theirs now.
Of course to every revolution there is a counter-revolution, and recent years have seen a return of low-key colors in fashion. But far from representing suburban normality or old-school comfort, high-style beige is all sharp tongue and urban angularity. “Beige is like the martini of color,” says New York-based club organizer Erich Conrad in an Esquire article called “Ecru Brut.” “It’s quiet but toxic.” There is certainly some evidence to the contrary. The commercials for Gap Khakis seem to reposition beige as the methamphetamine of color. But whatever your poison, too much of either might land you in the infirmary. And according to Sir Elton John — who knows a thing or two about substance abuse and sartorial extravagance — beige is one color that should be kept in the clinic. At a VH-1 Fashion Awards show a few years ago, John spoke out against “boutiques looking like hospitals, selling a lot of beige suits.”
1. Estimates of the number of pallets vary, and none are precise. This number comes from Philip A. Araman, a researcher at the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service and the coauthor of a forthcoming statistical study of the pallet industry. In discussion with the author, 10 January 2014.
Evil. Toxic. Hospital-like. Could these terms really apply to a hue that Webster’s describes as “the color of undyed wool?” Could the wolf really be dressed in sheep’s clothing? A quick numerological evaluation of color chip 468C in Pantone’s ubiquitous matching system reveals an astounding answer. Adding the color’s three numbers amounts to the number 18. And we all know that the number 18 results when you combine 6 + 6 + 6. cover/oct
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2. James L. Howard and Rebecca M. Westby, “U.S. Timber Production, Trade, Consumption and Price Statistics 1965–2011, Research Paper FPL-RP-676” (Madison, WI: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, 2013). Available at treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/43952.
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WES ANDERSON Interview with
by Terry Gross Anderson’s films include The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom. He speaks with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross about telling his first historical fiction story and how the film’s set came together.
we found everything else from the movie within a certain radius of that department store, and we discovered all sorts of things and people as we traveled around, figuring it all out. We made a pastiche of the greatest hits of Eastern Europe.
On what it’s like on his sets
On the use of miniatures for sets
The editing … and the construction of the sets and the design of the sets, even if it’s on location — this is all carefully planned. We gather all of the ingredients and we have it very prepared so that when the day comes to shoot, everything is sort of quite set in that way. But the actors — I feel like what happens is we all get together, they come on the set and then it’s just chaos, and they take over and it goes one way or another. We tend to do a lot of takes but very, very quickly, one right after another, and anything might happen on the next take. That’s my feeling of what it’s like on the sets of the movies I do. I think there’s choreography, but I always feel like it’s coming from them. Maybe that’s an illusion.
First, I love miniatures. It’s just an old movie technique, an old-fashioned approach. … There’s a certain charm to miniatures to me, I just like them. But also, when you’re doing a miniature it means you can make the thing exactly the way you want. You have essentially no limitation. We were quite inspired by these paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and their views. A whole spa town would be presented in a painting,
a mural with the miniature in it. And we did it in the style of Caspar David Friedrichso it became a miniature and a painting.
On having characters side by side, looking straight at the camera I have my own way of blocking things and framing things that’s built into me. I compare it to handwriting. I don’t fully understand it — why my handwriting is like this — but in a way there’s some sort of tonal thing with the kind of stories I do. They tend to have some fable element, and I think my visual predilections are somehow related to trying to make that tone and make my own writing work with performers.
On shooting on location I felt like I [didn’t] want to work in a movie studio. I’ve done it before; I don’t like it. I like to be on location; I like to have input from the real world that is helping to shape what we’re doing …For The Grand Budapest Hotel we found this department store in this town called Gorlitz, which is in Saxony. Half of it is in Germany and the other half is in Poland. It’s on the border and it’s about 20 minutes from [the] Czech Republic, so in a way it’s really right where our story would be if there was such a place. … This department store that we found, we made into our hotel — the big entrance hall of our hotel — and then
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The Orchestra
Art show guide to Arts Week in New York City
by George Prochnik
Thursday October 6 – Sunday October 9
“What song the Syrens sang, or
what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.”
ADAA: The Art Show Park Avenue Armory 643 Park Ave
Sir Thomas Browne
In the first years of the twenty-first century, New York City police officers had six different siren noises at their fingertips to alternate and overdub as they attempted to bore through stagnant traffic. The “Yelp” is a high-pitched, rapidly oscillating, jumpy sound that suggests a small dog with large teeth has hold of your thigh and is not about to let go. The “Wail” is the classic keening noise that the Furies might release while pursuing vengeance. The “Hi-Lo,” or “European,” is whiney, forlorn — prone to depression, but undeniably civilized. The “Air-Horn” is vulgarity incarnate — a burp, a rasp, an all-out bursty blast. The “Fast” or “Priority” resembles a hysteric who’s just mainlined crystal meth. The “Manual” is an outcast loner raising its rifle in a solitary low-to-high pulse. The summer of 2007 saw the fi≠rst broaching of the possibility that a seventh instrument might be added to the ensemble. The Rumbler™, developed by Federal Signal Corporation, is described in the company’s promotional material as an “intersection-clearing system.” The “revolutionary new concept” behind this technologically simple combo of an amplifier, two high-output woofers, and a built-in timer is the Rumbler’s capacity to interact with most existing siren amplifiers and create secondary, low-frequency tones. A Florida highway patrolman dreamed up the device while listening to the law-flouting, bass-thumping audio on local boom cars. Rumblers copy the primary siren signal, drop the frequency seventy-five percent, then hyperpump the volume. Federal Signal (the defendant in multiple class action suits by firefighters with hearing loss) reports that the depth of bass attained by the system has “the distinct advantage of penetrating solid materials, allowing vehicle operators and nearby pedestrians to FEEL the sound waves.” The Rumbler sounds like a gang of renegade computer games escaped from the screen and storming the streets. 2001: A Space Odyssey meets The Warriors. When New York City began entertaining the concept of introducing a new siren sound, many had qualms about the Rumbler’s potential to be unduly terrifying. But other police departments around the country, citing the need for stronger measures in an age of cell phone-iPod-AC–cocooned car interiors, began loading the siren and relishing its capacity to bust the bubble. Washington DC police chief Cathy Lanier, head of the first large police force to adopt the Rumbler, remarked, “In the age of technology there’s always something that distracts folks. This helps shake that distraction.” The new siren thus became an interventional tool promoting social focus. Robert S. Martinez, director of the New York City Police Department’s fleet services unit, found that every time he tried out the test model pedestrians and traffic were brought “to a dead stop.” Concurrently, prominent auto blogs began touting the “booty-shaking” effects of the device. One described the gluteal vibration induced by the Rumbler as “the best part of being pulled over.” A public yen for irresistible sensation dovetailed fortuitously with the authorities’ increasingly desperate need to command attention. Rumbler use continues to proliferate around the country, and these über-sirens are now a standard instrument in the police officer’s sound-mixing dashboard. cover/oct
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Whether you’re a serious collector or a casual art fan, this vast fair, run by the Art Dealers Association of America, offers the chance to peruse some of the world’s most impressive museum-quality pieces on the market.
The Armory Show Pier 92 711 Twelfth Ave This year’s event features a specially curated section devoted to Chinese contemporary art, featuring 16 galleries from Hong Kong and Mainland China.
Fountain Art Fair 69th Regiment Armory 68 Lexington Ave Founded in 2006 as an alternative art fair, Fountain remains the one art fair that emphasizes performance art along with other mediums.
SCOPE Skylight at Moynihan Station West 33rd St Features more than 50 contemporary art galleries from around the world, as well as additional venues taking part in SCOPE’s Breeder Program, which welcomes start-up venues to the art-fair scene.
VOLTA 82 Mercer Street Billing itself as the invitational show of emerging solo artists’ projects, VOLTA’s seventh edition includes 90 galleries from 30 countries, each presenting the work of a single artist.
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People as Pixels
Choreographing Crowds to Create Images by Peter Hall
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PEOPLE AS PIXELS
Choreographing crowds to create images, a little-not- design, the crowd motif became “pretty standard fare,” ed branch of graphic design, has become something according to Jim Lapides, owner of the International of a burgeoning medium in the last few decades. Poster Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts. Lapides cites Increasingly elaborate images are being created for the several posters in which the masses form Constructiveyes of aerial and stadium cameras — and millions of ist shapes as robust-looking as the factories and houses viewers — by transforming each person in a stadi- depicted alongside. “Solidarity was obviously the um crowd into a pixel. Literally. Scott Givens, who lynchpin of all these propoganda posters,” says Lapidbegan designing and orchestrating “stadium stunts” as es.” Showing a united front against some evil force.” a student at Perdue University in 1984, uses a propri- Subsequent classics include a 1937 Spanish Civil War etary software system that turns each participant into poster by an artist named Bofcereell depicting dozens of a bright pointillist dot. “I started doing these things armed soldiers marching to form a pointed arrow that because I thought football games were boring — I pierces a Swastika. got 600 kids and wrote some software that designed card stunts,” says Givens. “Now it works for a whole At street level, the creation of a mass graphic can be as stadium. The software takes each section and, like edifying for the participants as for the spectator, hence its Quark or Illustrator, lets me paint it at the stroke of a popularity among left-wing and solidarity movements. mouse.” Armed with this tool and a growing under- A photograph of Red Square from the 1930s depicts part standing of how much an audience can be expected of a display by over 40,000 youths belonging to various to do, Givens’ company, Stadium Stunts, has built a athletic clubs from around the Soviet Empire, with one portfolio full of giant logos, patterns and emblems — group, from the “Locomotive Club,” parading in star from the orchestration of 1,400 schoolchildren to form formations. It’s also an infinitely more photographable Disney Animal Kingdom graphics in New York’s demonstration of collective force than, say, a picket line. Central Park to the opening and closing ceremonies of New York–based designer Stefan Sagmeister used the the Atlanta Olympics. One of Givens’s biggest stunts medium in a political poster he designed as a student in at the Olympics was “growing” a 20,000-person laurel, a small town in the Austrian Alps. Asked to create an which over a few seconds flourished from small stems image for a local anarchy movement, he persuaded his classmates to lie in the school playground in the shape of into giant golden leaves. the anarchy symbol, while he photographed them from By all accounts, motivating the crowd to make the a rooftop. “First, you have to convince all these people to graphic is the easy part. Once the effect is designed on do it, which is also a good opportunity to tell them about the computer screen, colored cards are distributed in your cause, and the day of the photo taking is a great the stadium with simple instructions on each seat be- event for everybody concerned, or at least was in my case fore a game, and, when spectators arrive, cues appear with the Anarchy ‘A,’” says Sagmeister. “When it’s done, on the stadium’s television monitors. According to Giv- some of the feeling of that big production — that it was ens’ partner, Jennifer Munday, the rest is plain sailing. difficult to do and pull together — gets translated to the “I don’t want to say ‘Monkey See Monkey Do,’” she viewer. And of course, for all the people in the picture, says, “but people really get caught in the spirit of it and it’s great to see if they can find themselves.” hold up their cards on cue, especially if they see what’s But as Lapides notes, the paradox of mass graphics projected on the other side.” is that while the aim may be to raise the spirits and This is no newfound revelation. Pageantry has been ultimately the status of the individual through colused to portray the omnipotence of everyone from Cae- lective action, at a certain scale, the effect is to dehusar to Hitler to Disney, and as every demagogue knows, manize the individual. The person becomes about as it doesn’t take much to get people involved. Depictions important as a pixel, valued only in terms of their conof crowds forming figurative graphics began to really tribution the whole. This fact has not been lost on the catch on with the simultaneous emergence of proletar- more heavy-handed regimes of the 20th century. When ian masses and methods of mass reproduction, at the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited North beginning of the 20th century. In 1920s Soviet poster Korea in August last year, around 30,000 people in a
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PEOPLE AS PIXELS
stadium in the capital city, Pyongyang, flicked color-coded cards in a highly synchronized display to create images of Communist triumphs such as tractors, potato harvests and electrical transformers. An image from The New York Times report of the extravaganza on October 24 includes a photograph of the stunt featuring images closely resembling the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, surrounded by cohorts. The effect, at least to Western eyes, was strikingly close to the Bauhauser Xanti Schawinsky’s famous poster of Mussolini from 1934, in which the Italian dictator’s body is composed of a montage of thousands of people. Walter Benjamin argued in his seminal 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that such efforts to render politics aesthetic was a means for Fascism to give the new proletariat masses a chance to express themselves without affecting the property structure. “In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves.” In visual terms, the idea reaches its most resonant demonstration with Nazi propoganda: in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a documentary film of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally which is both a hagiograph of Hitler and an illustration of the ultimate subordination of the individual to the will of the state, with marching lines of proud troops, continually reforming for the Führer under the omnipresent gaze of the camera. In Hans Nidecken-Gebhard’s 1937 film Seven Hundred Years of Berlin in German History, troops march on the field of Berlin Olympic Stadium to form a giant image of the eagle and swastika. At its root, the mass-people graphic is inextricably linked to Utopian thinking. A recent exhibition titled “Utopias” at the New York Public Library takes a journey through the ideal societies dreamed up by Western thinkers from Plato to Marx, with film clips that clearly belong in the mass-graphic canon. A utopic Eisenstein film, LA LIGNE GENERALE from 1929 shows agricultural machinery moving in formation, creating patterns in the earth to the glory of the Soviet Union. A clip from Fritz Lang’s dystopic Metropolis shows workers marching to their underground workplace in converging lines that create a half-star formation. Plato’s Republic, with “a place for everything, and everything in its place,” finds a troubling visual expression in the spectacle of thousands of people moving in unison and harmony to form motifs. It
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is a more persuasive image than even a utopic building, because it immediately denotes the cooperation — or obedience — of the populus. Unlike, say, in Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, obedience is not an abstract premise on which the Utopian environment is founded. It is tangible reality.
has described the Western festival. One might also argue that Disney is more about fun than propaganda: At the Chinese ceremonies in 1987, “ ‘joy’ took a back seat to ‘civilization’” says Brownell. “Constant attention to obeying rules took much of the joy out of the occasion.”
In China, as Susan Brownell notes in her 1995 book Training the Body for China, choreographed mass spectacles make use of a Confucian principle. “When structured body movements are assigned symbolic and moral significance and are repeated often enough, they generate a moral orientation toward the world that is habitual because the body as a mnemonic device serves to reinforce it.” According to Brownell, the mass calisthenics staged at the opening ceremonies of the 1986 National College Games in China illustrate how such events subtly make use of pre-Communist rituals deeply ingrained in the culture. The success of such events as demonstrations of controlled behavior seems to be derived from the instinctive human need for ritual. Brownell notes that the two most important early sports sites in Communist Beijing were located on the grounds of two especially significant temples of the Qing state religion, where dancing, music and ceremonial sacrifices were made until 1911. The Qing rituals were effectively replaced by athletics events with equally choregraphed rituals, the purpose of which was to bring about a greater sense unity among the participants — and “dramatize a world order that organizes human bodies in space and time, with the State portrayed as the keeper of that order,” as Brownell, a social scientist and former athlete who took part in the games, puts it. At the 1986 Games, this included a performance called “Hope,” in which 1,200 primary-school children were choreographed to form large multicolored blocks, and a “Dragon Dance Finale,” in which 50 boys carried a dragon.
But this is obviously a Western perspective, elevating individual joy over societal goals. Though we might think that there is something sinister about training children to move in mass formations to create images that glorify a Communist regime, others might say the same of choregraphing children to form corporate logos of brand identities associated with purchasable merchandise. It is difficult to escape the fact that during a mass spectacle, the individual moves in homage to a greater power, be it the state or the corporation. Even the “Mexican Wave,” which begins apparently spontaneously in soccer stadiums and creates a pleasing rippling effect throughout a stadium, requires a humbling submission of the individual will to the mass gesture. The “Utopias” exhibition concludes with a section on the web that examines techno-utopias, posing the question: “Is an ideal ‘community’ made up of virtual identities a utopia?” According to John Perry Barlow of the Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF), the answer is yes: “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications,” writes Barlow on EFF’s website. “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” In other words, utopia. Barlow’s image of a “standing wave” is poignant. Like the Mexican Wave, or the sea of North Korean performers in Pyongyang stadium, its beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The metaphysical transformation once required to enter utopias like Heaven or Nirvana is now available at the click of a mouse. But have we created an ideal society or a dystopic, dehumanized hell in the process? Are we being liberated, or are we finally becoming pixels? That, too, depends on your vantage point.
What is the difference between the “Hope” performance involving 1,200 schoolchildren in Beijing and the Disney Animal Kingdom stunt involving 1,400 schoolchildren in New York? One might argue that the former is a state-ordered event whereas the Disney incident displays a “performative expression of bourgeois culture,” as Brownell
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“The most democratic publishing vehicle in history, the Internet, is also the most fragile.�
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Who Owns History ? Archiving the Internet by David Womack
The history of the Internet is located between an auto-body shop and a set of new condos at the corner of 6th and Mission in San Francisco. The building, which one of the tenants describes as “an old sweatshop,” does have a front door, but Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, prefers to use the freight elevator that opens off the alley. One hundred and fifty or so PCs sit nested in cables in a large loft on the second floor. These machines contain 10 billion web pages full of the promises of politicians, satellite images of Siberia, chats on knitting, chemical formulas for homemade explosives, and every other type of information — both profound and profane — human beings might conceivably produce, stretching back to 1996.
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Nineteen ninety-six was when Brewster Kahle set out to …7,300,000 new web do the preposterous — to archive the entire Internet not pages are published just once, but over and over again. He has now created every day… the largest and most complete archive of the Internet in existence. Taken together, these machines hold well over a hundred terabytes of data — four times more information than is contained in the Library of Congress. Kahle is currently archiving every public website approximately once every two months. Until October 2001, when Kahle made the archives free and open to the public via an application he named “the Wayback machine,” these machines hummed away in relative obscurity. Now, the machines and the information they contain are at the forefront of a debate that is determining the future of the web’s history. Seven million three hundred thousand new web pages are published every day, adding up to 250 megabytes of information produced a year for every man, woman, and child on earth. However, though information is now being created at an unprecedented pace, it is forgotten almost as quickly. Web pages, on average, exist for only about 100 days. Unlike mass-consumable printed material, web pages — even large, “dense” ones — often disappear without a trace. They “go dark.” The templates and databases are discarded, dismantled, or over-written. Without the Archive, millions of pages of information would have disappeared completely. As the pace of information accelerates, we have fewer resources to understand the present and are remembering less and less about the past. Without this information we have no means to learn from our success and failures. “Paradoxically,” Kahle has written, “with the explosion of the internet we live in a digital dark age.”
people could have tackled this project and even fewer would have chosen to. After graduating from MIT in 1982, Kahle founded several companies that did groundbreaking work in information storage and retrieval. It was the sale of a company called WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) Inc. in 1995 that provided the initial capital to start the Archive. Since then Kahle has brought in notable partners such as the Library of Congress, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian. While these partnerships provide some cover in the legal battles that are beginning to threaten both the project and Kahle personally, the ten million-dollar annual budget continues to come primarily out of Kahle’s pocket. The payoff, Kahle insists, is personal. “My definition of a life well lived,” he told me, “is to be of service to others.” Kahle loses money on every megabyte. While the business model may seem distinctly dot-com, the goal hearkens back to the Renaissance. Kahle’s aim, he says, is “universal access to human knowledge.” Human knowledge seems a strange way to describe the information in the Archive. On 9 September, the President made the following remarks about terrorism, “We know we can’t make the world risk-free but we can reduce the risks we face, and we have to take the fight to the terrorists … rallying a world coalition with zero tolerance [and] by improving security in our airports and our airplanes.” The year was 1996 and the president was Bill Clinton as quoted on Whitehouse.gov. Or, go back to October of 2000 and read Enron.com on respect: “We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance do not belong here.” Or, perhaps a statement of shareholder value from WorldCom from the same period, “WorldCom has a strong track record of creating shareholder value . The opportunities for future growth are superb.” If your tastes run towards the macabre, you can travel back to 1997 and read the statement on suicide by the members of Heaven’s Gate before they hitched a last ride on Hale Bopp: “The true meaning of ‘suicide’ is to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered.”
Archiving the Internet is, conceptually at least, remarkably straightforward. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Lycos rely on programs called “spiders” to gather information to feed their search engines. The spider is a program that visits remote sites and automatically downloads their contents for indexing, creating a kind of snapshot of each page of the site. When you do a web search, it is the index, rather than the great wide web itself, that is being referenced. Search engines are interested in only the latest information; as new information becomes available, old entries are overwritten. The Archive collects these old snapshots. Kahle’s genius was to recognize the value of this information and then to build a container large enough to hold it. Few other
“Isn’t it the coolest thing around?” says Christopher A. Lee, chairman of the Electronic Records Section of the Society of American Archivists. Lee points out that, in addition to making governments and corporations accountable for past statements, the archive is a valuable record of a society in transition. Millions of individuals who have posted personal homepages to the web have
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created an unprecedented resource for historians of the The payoff is personal. future. “A lot of social historians would say a website that “My definition of a life says, ‘Here’s a picture of me, here’s a little bit about my well lived, is to be of cat’ tells us so many important things about how peo- service to others.” ple were using the Internet at a particular point in time.” Brewster Kahle The Internet Archive has allowed researchers to analyze the Web in unprecedented ways. The Archive is not just a collection of pages and sites; it also captures the links between them. When you go to an archived site from 1996 and click on a link, the link brings up another site — from 1996. The user can move laterally across the web, from archived site to archived site, experiencing a unique 360-degree perspective of a moment in time. With a few clicks of the mouse, the historian can achieve an effect that would have taken thousands of hours of research before the archive. Kahle believes that the Archive is particularly important in the wake of the dot-com bust. “Archiving technology transitions is very important because, initially at least, technology is often disappointing,” he says. “But by looking at the disappointments, you get an idea of what people wanted from the technology in the first place. What were their dreams for the technology? From this perspective, the failures can be just as interesting as the successes.” But not everyone wants us to remember. “Brewster is taking an extraordinary personal risk, because this is potentially a criminal offense,” says Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University professor of law who recently argued the groundbreaking intellectual property case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, before the US Supreme Court. Kahle has found an unlikely enemy in the institutions whose business it is to inform the public. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other major news and entertainment organizations have had their sites removed from the archive. This is because they sell what Kahle wants to give away for free. The New York Times charges $2.95 for access to each article in its online archives — articles that, initially, were free on the site. This business model assumes that only the latest version of the site is available to the public. And, although the articles themselves may be preserved in the Times’ private archive, the context in which the article appeared is lost. It is impossible to see, for instance, what the New York Times website looked like on 11 September 2001.
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The government, too, has removed historically significant information from the public domain. Following September 11, there was a massive effort to purge information that might be in any way construed to be of value to terrorists. The entire Nuclear Regulatory Commission domain was removed from the Archive, including safety reports on American nuclear power plants. Sites that contained information on water supplies and chemical formulas were also removed from the Archives. In an effort to deprive terrorists of information, the government has deprived current and future citizens of an understanding of how the government communicated on important issues in difficult times. Perhaps the hole in history is an indication of its own. The most democratic publishing vehicle in history, the Internet, is also the most fragile. Not only do websites depend on the collaboration of intricate and rapidly aging systems but they also depend on the whim of the author, the sensitivities of the subject, and the censor’s nervous cursor. The same qualities that have enabled the web to host a billion voices also threaten their survival: websites are easy to put up, take down, and change. The question is whether there will be any public record of these changes, or whether we, like the ever-changing web itself, must be trapped in the present and accept as true and inevitable whatever appears upon our flickering screens for lack of any comparison. In 1984 George Orwell predicted this dilemma with disturbing accuracy: “Within twenty years at the most,” he reflected, “the huge and simple question, ‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’ would have ceased once and for all to be answerable.”
Another assault on the Archives comes from the Church of Scientology. Unlike the media organizations, the
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Church is not seeking to exclude its own sites from the Archive, but rather the sites of its critics. The Church insisted that the Archive remove pages that quoted from Church materials, claiming that such pages violate its copyright. Because of the way the Archive stores information, it is impossible to go in and remove single pages or sections of text. Fearing one of the Church’s infamous legal assaults, the Archive has been forced to remove entire sites against the will of the owners because of a single questionable paragraph. In an email to the Archive, the owner of one site says he was “puzzled and disturbed” to try to access his site on the archive only to get a message that said that the site had been removed at the “owners’ request.”
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MODERNIST MALICE
Hollywood’s Lexicon Of Visual Style by Andrea Codrington
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In Hollywood’s lexicon of visual style, modernist the sweat and blood of an underclass that lives, quite design is a persistent signifier of menace and malice literally, underground. As much as scenes in Freders— whether manifested in the stark, rectilinear forms en’s realm are marked by geometric regularity and orof the International Style or the more biomorphic, derliness, the subterranean realm seethes with disarray futuristic shapes of mid-century designers. Cruel- and insect chaos. The film’s messianic character—the ty and control form the artistic range of modernism’s poor but beautiful Maria — points out Lang’s main walk-on parts in films, despite the fact that its origins argument against modernism when she exclaims, partly involved a utopian attempt to counter the hor- “Between the mind that plans and the hands that build rors of social and economic inequality. Directors from there must be a Mediator, and this must be the heart.” Fritz Lang to Stanley Kubrick have used design and The film’s narrative arc follows the toppling of Frederarchitecture as an ominous presence in the dramas that sen’s rarefied architectural atmosphereand the establishunfold on the screen — silent players that speak vol- ment of a workers’ paradise. umes about 20th-century villainy and vanity. Modernism’s call-to-order may have originated from From the very beginning, modernism has been direct- the desire to create mass-produced buildings and ly aligned with the machine, and the marriage of the objects for the emancipated proletariat, but its rectwo has become Central Casting’s shorthand for any tilinear grid creates Caligari-reminiscent visual cagnumber of social pathologies. As if in direct response es for the hapless characters who encounter it in the to Frank Lloyd Wright’s proclamation, “My God is movies. Alfred Hitchcock, for one, consistently uses machinery, and the art of the future will be the architectural styles to mirror internal states of mind and, expression of the individual artist through the thou- in some instances, even employs them as instigators of sand powers of the machine,” Fritz Lang’s Metropolis conflict, confusion, and slipped identity. In an essay in (1927) opens on an explicit visual connection between Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But the two: a lingering shot of a rectilinear skyscraper Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, Slavoj Zizek goes so far as superimposed with the pumping pistons of some to trace Norman Bates’ psychotic split to his inabiliinfernal machine. ty to locate himself between the anonymous modernist box of Bates Motel and his mother’s Gothic house on Joh Fredersen, the “Master of Metropolis” — the arche- the hill — a state that is echoed in the chaos of Lang’s typal architect and urban planner writ large — lives in Metropolis, which also lacks a mediation between head luxury in an aerie whose only view is the modernist ziggurats that slice the sky. There is no sign of nature from Fredersen’s vantage point save a few scudding clouds — the only non rectilinear element in the entire cityscape. The urban engine is, of course, fed by
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and heart, past and present. (Of course mediation — historical or otherwise — was never Modernism’s goal. In fact, its Bauhaus practitioners dismissed all remnants of an architectural past as bourgeois and geared up a utopian effort to “start from zero.”) Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959) is another suspense film that stars modernist design in the role of chaotic catalyst, whether in the sweeping plazas and marble masses of the United Nations, Henry Dreyfuss’s luxury 20th-Century Limited train, or the foreign spy Philip Vandamm’s cantilevered glass-and-redwood house near Mount Rushmore. (So enamored of mid- century style was Hitchcock that he even cast Eve Kendall, the chilly blonde double-agent, as an industrial designer.) It is against all three modernist backdrops that North By Northwest’s lead character, the debonair but hapless Roger Thornhill, becomes literally trapped by architecture. The UN complex —perhaps the century’s prime example of modernism as utopian new world order — becomes the scene of a murder and the beginning of Thornhill’s escape north and west; the train provides the circumstance for the no-exit cat-and-mouse between Thornhill and the police, not to mention the initial erotic engagement with Kendall; and, finally, the gigantic L-shaped cantilever supports of Vandamm’s house provide an opportunity for Thornhill to eavesdrop and get caught.
Koenig — is far removed from the clubby atmosphere of late-50s Manhattan, susupiciously replete with low-slung coffee tables, geometric textiles and Danish-modern armchairs. A more explicit association between xenophobia and design is made in 1960s-era James Bond films, which feature monomaniacal scoundrels of exquisite modernist tastes like the Sino-German scientist Dr. No, who inhabits a bunker on Jamaica made out of roughhewn rock that’s kitted out in austerely Miesian splendor. James Bond, for his part, is first and foremost a man of the British Empire. In the opening scenes of Dr. No (1962), the first Bond film ever made, he is seen at ease in green-walled, oak-floored flats amidst strictly Georgian appurtenances. In fact, the closer Bond gets to any kind of modernist design, the more in danger he seems to be, and the more manevolent a character, the more fastidiously modern his interior. An intermediary micro-villain, the geologist Professor R. J. Dent, literally falls somewhere between Bond’s classicism and Dr. No’s rectilinear strictness; his office exhibits a softer modernism reminiscent of the Eameses and certain Scandinavians. When Dent visits Dr. No’s hideaway to warn him of Bond’s presence on the island, he enters a marble chamber that houses one chair, one table, and a skylight that casts an oppressive gridded shadow modernist minimalism at its most stringent and alienating.
Often the association between arch-villainy and highstyle architecture carries with it an underlying xenophobia—most often Anglo-American in nature. North By Northwest’s Philip Vandamm, played by James Mason, is distinctly un-American in appearance and accent. Unlike the straight-shooting, square-shouldered Thornhill (Cary Grant), who inhabits the plush, comparatively baroque settings of the Plaza and upperEast-side apartments, Vandamm’s villainous tastes seem to run continental. The interior of his glass house — reminiscent of those built by celebrated European If Dr. No presents modernism as the backdrop for highémigrés like Richard Neutra, John Lautner, and Pierre stakes Cold War power plays, Stanley Kubrick uses it in A Clockwork Orange (1971) as the site of yobbish “ultraviolence.” (By having Alex and his “droogs” speak a hybrid slang peppered with Russian words like “moloko” and “divotchka,” A Clockwork Orange makes its own potentially xenophobic commentaries.) Design plays
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offers little privacy in the first place. The nuclear family dynamic of mother-father-daughter-son is disrupted in The Glass House, and the household follows suit: Gone is that American myth, the domestic nest, that is impenetrable, protected, private.
a vital role in evoking writer Anthony Burgess’s filmic dystopia, which blends elements of 1960s Swinging London with near-futuristic urban visions. Not surprisingly, one of the most brutal attacks in the movie takes place in a modernist manse in the countryside, all glass and extreme angles. The woman of the house, who is violated and then killed, is first seen emerging from a space-age white plastic pod — a latter-day Venus from the shell — to answer the door to a murderous Alex. Once inside, Alex literally uses the interior design as an accessory to crime. He dances on the curvilinear red furniture and positions himself to choreograph his victim’s humiliation and death. In Kubrick’s hands, Le Corbusier’s aspirations for the clean, well-lit space as a “Machine for Living” quickly turn into a perverse machine for dying. Modernism’s most iconic object, the glass house, recently took center stage in an eponymously titled “taut psychological thriller” whose actions unfold in a sprawling house in the hills overlooking Malibu. Two tragically orphaned children are taken under the wings of guardians, whose modernist complex offers up certain fun in the sun but ends up being an accessory to sinister actions and hidden intentions. “In this perfect house,” intones the movie trailer, “there are secrets she can’t uncover.” The hackneyed and less-than-subtle inverse relationship between the house’s transparency and the guardians’ opacity is played out in expressionistic visual tableaux featuring dramatic architectural elements like jagged, back-lit staircases, wall-sized glass windows, and jutting balconies. The film’s paranoiac atmosphere is emphasized by the intricate surveillance system that is set up inside the house — an additional stripping away of privacy within a structure that
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Modernism in the movies is more often than not marked with a distinctly European brand of maniacal control — one that not only threatens to blow up the world, but also to take away the soft, padded accoutrements of Anglo-American domesticity. Tom Wolfe, in From Bauhaus to Our House, points out that European proponents of modernism like Mies van der Rohe were largely guilty of perpetrating crimes of Wdiscomfort against America’s white-collar class — the only demographic that could actually afford modernism’s “worker architecture”— and American architects were all too glad to follow suit. “In the great corporate towers,” he writes,” the office workers shoved filing cabinets, desks, wastepaper baskets, potted plants up against the floorto-ceiling sheets of glass, anything to build a barrier against the panicked feeling that they were about to pitch headlong into the streets.” Today, of course, such a description of architectural vertigo seems oddly prophetic of those images of desperation preceding the World Trade Center collapses. In this instance, however, Hollywood has gotten it all wrong. Disaster, when it came, was not doled out by a diabolical and dapper villain tricked out in modernist minimalism and equipped with high-tech gadgetry, but by people hiding out in caves armed with more disdain for Western bourgeois ideals than any Bauhäusler could ever muster.
(ed )