Category: books
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Book review: Dig It!
IN 1971, PHILIP WYLIE wrote the teleplay for an episode of the TV series The Name of the Game entitled “L.A. 2017.” Set in a future where Los Angeles had been moved entirely underground due to lethally toxic air, the episode opens with a man driving to an environmental conference in 1971 who suddenly time-travels…
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Midcentury California Cohousing: Crestwood Hills
THE ORIGIN of Crestwood Hills begins in the cadence of a fairytale. Four musicians, returning from war, dreamt of combining their resources to build four neighborly homes around a swimming pool. It was 1946, in the midst of a severe housing shortage in southern California, and the musicians’ dream proved attractive to many. After placing an…
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Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic Design, 1936–1986
“MONOTONE DOES NOT signal class (at least in Southern California),” writes designer Lorraine Wild in Louise Sandhaus’s recent survey Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic Design, 1936–1986. Wild’s observation, like many others in this captivating, dayglo-jacketed book, celebrates a visual history of an environment that seems to counter the stringent, sometimes monotone rules of…
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Designed for Impact: Saul Bass
Even if you haven’t heard of Saul Bass, you know his work. From the poster for Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the shower scene in Psycho to the logos for AT&T and Quaker Oats to the humble, cheerful Dixie cup, Bass’s designs have become emblems of midcentury style and a ubiquitous part of our visual culture. A new hefty, lushly illustrated book…
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Surreal Grandeur of San Francisco’s Little-Known Salt Fields
The southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area is known for expensive real estate, tech companies, and aerospace engineers. Less well known is its salt content. Yet the salt industry has been a vital part of the South Bay for more than a century. Fly into any of the region’s airports and evidence of this…
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Images from the Stasi Archives
Simon Menner’s new book Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archives examines the vast collection of information and photos once gathered by the East German secret police. While coincidental, the timing couldn’t be better as news about the NSA surveillance program continues to dominate headlines. “I had come to realize that the public has very…
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Aldous Huxley on Mescaline, Botticelli, Scissors
David King Dunaway’s biography of Aldous Huxley, Huxley in Hollywood (1991) touches on the history and difficulties of pacifism in the years leading up to World War II; Hollywood’s ingestion of fine writers for schlocky screenplays in the 1940s; Huxley’s blindness and subsequent obsession with metaphors of vision; his prescient awareness of ecological damage; how the horrors…
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Book Review: Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad
Between Artists: Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad A.R.T. Press, 2008 “Do you think that a body of work can somatize such cultural trauma?” Silvia Kolboswki asks Walid Raad in the beginning of an email exchange that soon and unexpectedly begins to mirror such attempts. Raad received Kolbowski’s question last July at his home in Beirut…
Lyra Kilston 