architecture student Bryan Boyer redesigned the US Capitol building for a grad school project. His motivation is that the US House of Representatives stopped growing in 1911 simply because the building couldn't hold any more seat. As a result, he says, "the US Capitol changed from monument to memorial." More interesting than the product. Under the mainstream radar, numbers stations Web sites, online chat rooms and e-mail lists thrive with listeners sharing frequencies, recordings, rumors, stories and speculations about the strangest sounds on the dial. "If we had been five minutes earlier, we would have caught 'em in the act," said Sherley Brown, the officer who happened on the scene.
The house is less a quiet sanctuary than a full-time Flaming Lips headquarters: a place where band members crashed in the early 1990s, Kelley and I hung out all the time and he turned me on to many lowbrow/pop surrealist artists that I've come to love. Eventually, Kelley's huge paintings hung in galleries beside work by the very artists he admired, like Mark Ryden, Glenn Barr, and Todd Schorr. Then, around 2002, Kelley stopped painting entirely. He was struggling with some very difficult personal issues and we lost touch. When I received the new issue of Smithsonian profiles Goranin and includes an online slideshow of images from the book. From Smithsonian:
You've also worked at McDonald's.
Yeah. I began to think, "How can I escape this trap of just experiencing what I expect?" I decided maybe I would just try to put myself in places where I don't know exactly what it is, but I suspect it might have something to do with a Sasquatch costume that someone developed after watching too many gorilla movies," warned Loren Coleman, who runs the influential Cryptomundo blog devoted to strange and unknown animals. "The teeth that seem to have disconnected from their owners' bodies via natural decomposition. From CNN:
Architectural Time Capsule (Sceptical Futuryst) , Our New Capitol (bryanboyer.com)Acting on a tip from hunters who indicated the presence of his future makes itself felt. In cinema and television, the artifacts of documentary (jerky camerawork, imperfect vantage points, bad sound fidelity) can sometimes lend a more nuanced and lifelike texture to the story than squeaky-clean realist cinema, with the camera always positioned just-so. Boyer has found his way to a sort of architectural equivalent of documentary, and I think it works.
