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 

as it’s grammy weekend i thought i’d take some pictures of the iconic and legendary capitol records building.

well, i also thought i’d take some pictures of it because it’s a fantastic and fantastically anachronistic building, representing a time when record companies were huge and powerful and the music business was annually growing from strength to strength (even if the musicians themselves were routinely shafted in the process… oops, sorry had to get in a word for all of the musicians over the years who’ve been treated like dirty step-children while the executives at the record companies made tens of millions of dollars). but this building. it’s a great building, practically and conceptually.

it was designed (or so i’ve been led to believe) to look like a big stack of 7” 45rpm records, with a gigantic stylus (needle)pressing down upon the top record. everything about this has become amazingly anachronistic, as 7” records disappeared ages ago, and at this point the record business could be better understood as the i-tunes/mp3 business. no more records. no more needles (ironically there’s a needle exchange in the shadow of the capitol records building, but for a very different type of needle). 

but the anachronism, as represented architecturally, is charming and amazing and endearing and chilling (in that it represents a dead and dying industry). a form that had great relevance when it was conceived and built now just looks like a super-cool round building with a big weird spikey thing on top.

i guess it’s also worth remembering that this building was a shining beacon when pop music was elvis and frank sinatra and the beatles. and now pop music is, well, it is what it is. 

i won’t malign the state of pop music, specifically, but i will state the obvious: it’s not the beatles or simon and garfunkel or the clash or nirvana or alice in chains or marvin gaye or stevie wonder or bob marley or bruce springsteen or the rolling stones or rem, even though it once was.

it’s not idiosyncratic individuals who made challenging and beautiful and fascinating music that inspired hundreds of millions of people.

i won’t say what the world of pop music is. but i’m happy to state the obvious and point out what it isn’t, and what it used to be.

perhaps the demise of the record business has less to do with piracy and mp3’s than it does with the gaping maw that separates what the pop music world currently is as opposed to what it used to be.

sorry to be cranky, but music is precious to me and it breaks my heart to see it treated like trash. and, oops, the capitol records building is great architecture.

thanks,

-moby

ok, in my limited wisdom i’ve decided that these rocks can somehow be considered as architecture. my criteria being: people have used them for thousands of years as places to hide or sleep or eat or make star trek episodes.

so, thus: architecture. even if they were built by tectonic forces a very long time ago and not by swiss guys in prada glasses. (which, of course, is not to malign either tectonic forces or swiss guys in prada glasses).

these are vasquez rocks, named after an outlaw who used to hide out in the then unnamed rocks to evade the law. i’m guessing, by way of deduction, that his name was mr. vasquez.

i’m also including them because:

  • they were immortalized in an episode of star trek wherein kirk battled a lizard creature for the entertainment of higher beings (and me, and you, probably)
  • they are in los angeles and i don’t know of too many other cities where you can drive for 30 minutes and find yourself in the middle of the desert surrounded by crazy gigantic jagged rocks that have been immortalized in/by star trek.

yes, door to door it took me 35 minutes to get to vasquez rocks.
granted there was no traffic, which is rare.
and granted i probably drive a few too many miles over the legally posted speed limit.
but so does everyone, so i just see it as me partaking in massive and unintentional civil disobedience.
en route to giant rocks.
and no, i didn’t try to build a cannon using sulfur in order to vanquish the lizard creature foe.
mainly cos there wasn’t any sulfur.
nerds know of what i speak.

thanks

moby