The Null Device

If you ever wondered where Liberal Club student newspaper editors go once they graduate (other than the legal profession, that is), the answer could well be the Toorak Metropolitan News, which appears to be distributed for free in the South Yarra area. I saw a copy yesterday; it's one of those free "community papers" that's mostly ads (often for regionally-appropriate products such as hair-replacement therapy). The front page was vintage Tory-student-paper, though, and looked as if it had been put together in PageMaker by a graphically clueless political appointee. (What is it about Tories and clueless graphic design anyway? Back when I was at university, the Labor Club election propaganda looked as if it had been done by someone with decent visual sense, whereas the Liberal Club equivalents were a mishmash of distorted CorelDRAW novelty fonts. I imagine current Liberal Student flyers would probably use a lot of Comic Sans; but I digress.) About five too-narrow, full-justified columns of Times Roman, with the spacing consequently varying widely between lines, and too little whitespace elsewhere to not look cluttered. The content was a sub-Andrew-Bolt op-ed tract about how John Howard's doing such a good job with the economy and the Iraq situation and Latham and his loony-leftist goons should hang their heads in shame for opposing the removal of that rotter Saddam Hussein or something like that, complete with the author denying being, as many say he is, a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal. It came with a rather forced-looking alliterated headline (something about "Loony Liverpool Lout Latham Loses" or somesuch).

¶ design rightwingers ugly 12

Eyesore of the Month. Each month, James Howard Kunstler presents a photograph of a different architectural or urban-planning blight, accompanied by a brief and entertaining rant about the decline and fall of American civilisation (references to obese children, Prozac usage and "Car Park Nation" abound):

When your building has no meaningful relation with the public realm, the solution is to "export" the cartoons played within the house to the exterior. The neighborhood is then "populated" with recognizable, non-threatening figures. Once the installation is complete, the homeowner is released from any further obligation to public life, except to mow and trim the grass. The homeowner is then "free" to pursue a life devoted to television viewing. Such is life in the Home of the Brave.

The shark's head portion of this ensemble is probably its best feature -- putting aside any considerations of kitsch or "camp," ( that is, the love of vulgarity for its own sake.) No, what gets me, really, is the quality of the pink building behind Sharky. In a perfect world its function would be a poodle euthenasia center.

Here we have the old courthouse in Biloxi, Mississippi, (left) and its 1970s replacement (right) -- the sublime and the ridiculous. The old building is garbed in the architectural vestments of authority in decorum. The new courthouse invokes arbitrary bureaucratic despotism. Note to political economists: the building on the left came from a far less affluent society than the one at right.

¶ architecture humour sarcasm ugly usa wit 6