Better Living Through Lustronization!
The always fabulous Excitement Machine has a very interesting entry about Lustron Homes that makes a fine follow-up to my earlier post on the Dymaxion House.
The always fabulous Excitement Machine has a very interesting entry about Lustron Homes that makes a fine follow-up to my earlier post on the Dymaxion House.
Another highlight of my weekend in Detroit was a visit to the Henry Ford Museum to see the only surviving prototype of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House. Designed in the late 1940s, the Dymaxion was an attempt to address the post-WWII housing shortage in the US by using materials and construction techniques pioneered in the aviation industry. Sadly, it never caught on, otherwise all of us might be living in chrome houses inside of geodesic-domed cities, driving 3-wheeled cars!
MrsBaliHai and I took in the postmodern romantic farce Down With Love this evening. Ostensibly a remake of those embarassingly square, cheesy, and definitely unerotic Rock Hudson/Doris Day "sex" comedies from the '60s, I found it kind of like being trapped, albeit quite pleasantly, for 101 minutes in a Shag painting. The film wallows happily in every conceivable Technicolor cliche that I'm familiar with including bizarre New Frontier fashions, outrageously retro set design, split-screen phone conversations, flip double- or even triple-entendres, and even those wonderfully bad process shots viewed through the rear windows of cars, all backed by a terrific space-age bachelor pad soundtrack. I enjoyed myself thoroughly.
Other reviewers were considerably less kind, and although a lot of people find Rene Zellweger simply adorable, her squinty-eyed, puffy-cheeked visage makes me think of Popeye .
