The Fredösphere

Will these opinions stand the test of time?

Check out the Big Belt House at Massie Architecture; it's got just about the funkiest sink I've ever seen.  I'm not sure how exactly you clean the thing, however.  Oh, silly me -- supposing that it would ever get dirty.  One doesn't use a sink like that, does one.  It's just there for pretty.  (Hat tip to Core 77.)

Here is a fine article on the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose subject is large-scale industrial constructions.  The author describes the strange effect these photos create...

It's dangerously easy to get lost in the Bechers' photos, while at the same time losing your place in the recognizable world. It's also easy, turning the pages of these monographs, to miss the inspired variety amid the cumulative and deceptive sense of uniformity, the utter strangeness of so many of these portraits, the formal repetition and austerity offset by queerly buttressed towers, arches, ornate cupolas, and bizarrely stylized façades. There are huge gas tanks girdled by elaborate iron scaffolding, to the point that at first glance they resemble nothing so much as an old amusement-park roller coaster. The water towers range from medieval-looking brick structures topped with detailed porticoes to the more familiar streamlined and bulbous monstrosities of the Midwest, which still seem inspired by nothing so much as the futuristic visions of the 1950s.

...and the difficulty of imitating that effect:

Ultimately, however, the problem with my field trip was that, while I had no problem finding source material for a great Becher photo everywhere I went, I couldn't quite translate what I was seeing into true Becher art. What these artists do, of course, isn't quite so easy as just looking at something carefully. A great photographer is a translator, and the Bechers translate everything they look at into their own language. Though I suddenly found myself seeing everything around me in Becher-like abstraction, I could never quite manage the atmosphere of those photos.

I found a Becher monument just once in my life.  Somewhere on the road from my parents to my Aunt Virginia in Goshen, Indiana, in an empty field stands an abandoned grain elevator with strangely classical proportions that for some reason strikes me with pure terror every time I see it.  It gave me the ambition to capture it in a B&W photo I would call Saturn Devouring His Children, a name I can't justify except to say it feels right.  Now I wonder if it would be so easy to capture my feeling in a photograph.

For more creepy buildings, try the Modern Ruins and this linkörama of Detroit historical buildings, including the fabulous Ruins of Detroit.  Alas, Babylon!

What's that?  You came here on April Fools' Day to have fun?  Sorry if I and my grain elevators have brought you down.  Here, try this list of the ten worst hoaxes of all time.  (But you may have to wait until tomorrow; I hear this is a busy day for them.)

Ask me sometime about the internet hoax my friends and I tried to start.  In fact, we gave up on the idea; we realized there was no way to start a rumor worth spreading without creating the risk of troubling some innocent people.  I can't even remember the various ideas we considered, except that the ones I liked involved the IRS and some monstrous injustice they were about to cook up.  Others less squeamish than me have conducted internet rumor experiments, like this lame one linking John Rhys-Davies to a rogue branch of the CIA, a space alien fetus, ABBA, and St. John's Lutheran Church of Sioux Rapids, South Dakota.  (Ha!  Made ya look!)