Birth of the California Cool...

Hey political junkies, check out architectural history in the American West for a second. Here's how the article defines "cool": an emphasis on restraint and detachment.

By that definition, FCP'ers are definitely not Cali "cool." See pic of Lou Reed for California Cool in action.

Lately, thanks to my Mongolian comrade, I've taken in a bit of art history by way of Hermann Broch (at least as he saw the late-19th century Impressionist painters such as van gogh). Broch was hard on Vienna, a sentiment lost on me when I visited the city in the autumn of 2000. Broch's reasons, though, were later understandable.

Another recommend would be Virginia & Lee McAlester, "A Field Guide to American Houses" (Knopf Publishing), where certain architectural trends are itemized and placed, for the reader, in their historical context.

And I recently received "Learning From Las Vegas" (MIT Press) by Yale architect Robert Venturi. As far as I can tell (I've only had time to read the introduction; more this weekend), Venturi swooped into Las Vegas in early '70s with a small team of graduate students, they collected data on Sin City for a couple weeks, and then churned out this book in an effort to guide Vegas (and other architects in any locale) away from, for example, putting huge neon signs atop replicas of the arch de
triumph (or something like that).

And as of late, the city of L.A. is trying to figure out how to best preserve Bukowski's abode.

I haven't had this much architectural history since my Age of Augustus grad seminar a couple years back.