Week 8
12.24.01
http://www.ferestenphoto.com/
fconcourse.html
Man, they sure do hate trains in Detroit. What the
Motor City did to that train station, most towns wouldn't do to
a doghouse. You know, I've been inside that vast ruin,
and the best photos can't do it justice, though these come close.
The place is uncanny. It's truly unheimlich.
http://www.ferestenphoto.com/cface.html
12.25.01
My neighborhood is noted for bizarre lawn displays in the holiday
season. For Christmas 2001, this mysterious reindeer centaur appeared in
my own front yard.
She's supposed to be distributing
peppermints to the local children, but for some reason I can't
pretend to understand, people keep giving her cash.
12.26.01
There's no ruin quite like a giant industrial ruin.
Andrew Carnegie made a lot of money out of this
steel mill, and now it's inventing a new visual vocabulary
of raw decline.
http://www.oboylephoto.com/rankin/
index.htm
These intimate close-ups of the pipes are my favorites.
http://www.oboylephoto.com/rankin/
rankin9.htm
You have to wonder: why is all that metal still there?
It's not as if anybody loved the place. Couldn't somebody
chop up all that steel in the steel mill and feed it to a steel mill?
http://www.oboylephoto.com/rankin/
rankin5.htm
12.27.01
If rusty hardware alone fails to deliver sufficient frisson,
consider this German website. It appears to be run by an entire
art-movement of guys who do photo shoots of industrial ruins -- with nude
models.
Note the studiously detached, Ballardian expressions on the women on
this website who are *not* professional models. I'd be guessing they are
wives and girlfriends. And I'd be really wondering about the conversations
that preceded this activity.
Warning: if you find peeling paint, shattered walls, and exposed wiring
offensive, please, don't even look here.
http://www.shedworks.de/home.html
12.28.01
The great Veruschka Lehndorff from her mind-boggling
"Transfigurations" photo album. It's as if she's become so
sick of being a '70s supermodel that she's decided to melt into
the landscape.
http://www.veruschka.net/images/
dyptch_neben.jpg
This is the kind of assertive, conscious, feminist nudism that
men find really disappointing. It's like: "Hey wait a minute!
She's naked and pretty, but *so ingenious that I can barely
see her!* Hey, what about *me,* what about *my* needs?"
http://www.veruschka.net/images/blue.jpg
http://www.veruschka.net/images/
holzfensterneu.jpg
Oh yeah, here I stand, handsome; walk right through me!
A lotta good it'll do ya.
http://www.veruschka.net/images/
tureoffen.jpg
"It's *not even fair!* She's buck naked but she *put
on so much make-up* that she vanished right into the forest!"
If you're a woman, you look at an image like this and
think: "Oh yeah. That's it. I have days like that all the time."
http://www.veruschka.net/images/
wald.jpg
Bruce Sterling writes books like Darwin watched animals. Find out more about him, and read tattered electronic copies of Cheap Truth, at the Bruce Sterling Online Index. He lives with his wife Nancy and their two daughters in Austin, Texas.
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