tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post5200947661062105617..comments2024-02-23T03:28:33.435-05:00Comments on Culture Industry: utopian Miami BeachMark Scrogginshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01431113440875342809noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post-83091063953077918092009-11-23T23:37:14.205-05:002009-11-23T23:37:14.205-05:00Ooooh, gorgeous!
So it's not coming to the W...Ooooh, gorgeous! <br /><br />So it's not coming to the West Coast?<br /><br />A while back I checked out an amazing coffee-table art book of all the Florida art deco stuff as part of my preliminary "research" ... and later on I discovered the joys of copy shops' color printer/enlargers for decorating my place. Maybe I should get that art book out again and put a pic of one of those gorgeous ocean liners of a building on my walls!Sisyphushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09880634753539329199noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post-80200817123470378052009-11-23T15:40:57.657-05:002009-11-23T15:40:57.657-05:00Hi Mark,
You know I lived in Miami Beach Art Deco...Hi Mark,<br /><br />You know I lived in Miami Beach Art Deco apartments from '42 to '56. Here's a bit from Living Root about the Art Deco hotel interiors, interiors that to my mind were the original post-modern constructs of our time:<br /><br /><br />"And yet, as a fairly new and speedily erected vacation place, Miami Beach also seemed constructed to repel time, to assert with Ozymandian arrogance the power of Works over the eons. For the constant peculiar islandedness of the area, which embossed its resort culture with the raised lips of the pleasantly fantastic and the commercially viable improbable, had detached it as well from history and even reality. That sense of time passing, as marker and reshaper of human existence, had been totally abandoned. <br /> In effect, time, the causal element of all contrasts was missing, which led to a kind of free play of the signifiers; it gave to the shops on the streets and the hotels and swimming pools a quality of both distance and familiarity highly original to the tourist. One suspects there were other places like it in the world, certain amusement parks such as The Tivoli in Copenhagen, or the cluttered haut bourgeois sitting rooms of Hapsburg Vienna. Yet nowhere had histories and cultures been so thoroughly ransacked, to be reconfigured on purely different (commercial) lines as in the Miami Beach hotel lobby. There, an imaginary axe had been taken to the historical-cultural continuum. Time and geography had been chopped up into 18th century Chinese lacquered screens, Italian provincial settees resting on the patterned curlicies of Persian carpets where they were positioned in the shadows of plaster Venus De Milos. Strauss waltz music played on the Musak, webbing the entire lobby in the straining strands of violins. There was nothing second rate about these fakes cleverly deployed across vast expanses of thick, dark carpet among which the Jews of the Bronx and Brooklyn and Philadelphia oohed and aahed. They had come here to be provincial in a different way, both to stand in mild awe at their surroundings and to snub, with crude manners, this plaster cornucopia of the past."Michael Hellerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00918018944344310642noreply@blogger.com