i’m not sure where my love of abandoned buildings comes from. or, syntactically, i’m not sure from where my love of abandoned buildings comes. in any case: i love abandoned buildings.

when i was growing up i used to spend hours and days:
finding abandoned buildings.
breaking into abandoned buildings.
wandering around abandoned buildings.
and etc.

the abandoned buildings i played in as a child were all relatively old and victorian (which made them even creepier and fantastic). whereas l.a tends to have abandoned mid-century buildings, like this amazing, abandoned hotel. at least i think it’s a hotel. or was a hotel.

now it’s just a big, abandoned, beautiful modern building either waiting to be rescued from entropy or quietly observed by weirdos like me as entropy ravages it further. all the while writing run-on sentences, which i also love.

this particular abandoned building piques and keeps my interest because it clearly as at one point was a brand new building filled with mid century hipsters and swingers doing mid century hipster and swinger things (involving cocktails and lava lamps and prescription medication, one assumes). and now it sits moribund, with great lines and great bones, but moribund.

some buildings (old victorians, etc) seem like they were old when they were new. other buildings (mid century, etc) seem like they were designed to be forever new and futuristic, which makes their inevitable slide into entropic dissolution even more jarring, and strangely beautiful.

like abandoned space stations, almost. which, possibly, this is.

ok, have a nice weekend.

moby 

ok, i’ll be honest, i don’t expect anyone to either like today’s pictures or understand why i’ve put them up here.
which is not to imply that the pictures are so sophisticated that only 3 semiotics professors in zurich could understand them.
no.  i mean, if these are sophisticated pictures then they’re accidentally sophisticated.
they’re what they seem to be, pictures of an abandoned liquor store in the middle of hollywood.
i’ve always loved abandoned buildings. abandoned factories, abandoned apartment buildings, abandoned railway stations (this might be one of the reasons why i like detroit so much, as detroit is mecca for abandoned buildings).
i love them.  generally more than their unabandoned counterparts.
so:
i drive by this abandoned liquor store every day.
and i wonder.
here’s what i wonder:

  • for how long has it been abandoned?
  • isn’t it odd to have an abandoned building sitting in the middle of a big city?
  • when it becomes unabandoned will it be used well or will it, as is often the case, be a step down from abandonment?

and yes, ‘unabandoned’ isn’t a real word.
some odd things about this odd abandoned liquor store.

  1. there’s some interesting tyler the creator graffiti on the back wall.
  2. the roof is succumbing to entropy faster than the rest of the building.
  3. american apparel are getting years of free advertising, although i’m not sure it’s the sort of upscale demographic association they’d normally be interested in.
  4. it’s a few hundred feet from the corner of sunset and gower, where the first hollywood film studios once stood.
  5. i think that’s all i have.
  6. oh, what do tourists think when they come to hollywood expecting cinematic glamour and instead are confronted with crumbling abandoned liquor stores?

i’m off to canada now.  i’m working under the assumption that i won’t find derelict, abandoned, entropic liquor stores in toronto, but who knows.
i love canada, even if it’s missing the baffling squalor of the united states (well, specifically los angeles).

ok, have a nice weekend.

oh, and just to warm things up a bit i’m also including a picture of some trees in griffith park.

moby