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In a loving Los Angeles Times piece last week on the occasion of Saturday’s celebration, Mike Boehm remembers the time 50 years ago when L.A.’s idiosyncratic, cathedral-like folk art monuments the Watts Towers were almost torn down. Built by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia between 1921 and 1954, the property was slated for demolition, but rescued [...]

Legendary modernist architectural photographer Julius Shulman (seen in the self-portrait at right) passed away Wednesday night at age 98, and over the course of his rich, visionary career, he captured some of the most legendary modern structures of the 20th century, both in the U.S. and abroad, by architects like Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, [...]

Okay, so there are probably way more than 10,000 people featured on this encyclopedic Google map created by Prop 8 Maps to give the names, addresses, activities and contributions of everyone in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Salt Lake City who helped pass California’s ban on same-sex marriage last year.
As with many web phenomena, we’re [...]

By now we’ve all see the Obamaguration satellite pictures, which brought home once again the tremendous power of the space-bird’s eye view. Of course, there are also the various creepy government surveillance possibilities of satellite imagery, but we feel those have been adequately explored in several Hollywood blockbusters. No, for us satellite images are simply [...]

Some time ago, in an earlier edition of our weekly psychoanalysticle Freudian Fridays, we looked at some of the most overt, excessive and unsubtle phallic monuments built by man. While the need to put power, potency and might into concrete (and steel and glass) expression smacks of typical late-capitalist chauvinism, it would be a mistake [...]

With streets, neighborhoods and entire cities increasingly surveilled around the clock by cops, cameras and private security forces, street art has never been so vital. Not surprisingly, it’s also practically impossible in wealthy neighborhoods, so the areas with the richest street culture tend to be the poorest and most officially neglected, a kind of sweet [...]

In yesterday’s New York Times opinion piece on the Detroit auto industry, Mitt Romney went above and beyond to alienate the voters he failed to win over during this year’s Republican primaries (read: “not suburban”, “not rich”). Tapping into his insider knowledge as a car company president’s son, Romney’s main argument for letting Detroit’s Big [...]