Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1994 [1978])
By Rem Koolhaas

Synopsis: This book basically sees Manhattan as a "theatre of progress" and mythical fantasy laboratory immersed in the "culture of congestion." It argues that Manhattan is a pinnacle of the artificial, and that its massive congestion is its own brand of urbanism. The book comes across as somewhat of a "fuck you" to Modernist Puritanical "order." Includes sections on "Coney Island: The Technology of the Fantastic" (theme parks of Coney Island as obsessed with the artificial; machines and lights; creation and destruction; Dreamland and its bizarre Lilliputia land of midgets and skewed morality - i.e. promiscuity, homosexulaity, nymphomania, etc.); "The Double Life of Utopia: The Skyscraper" (Manhattan skyscraper born 1900-1910 as a "utopia device for the production of unlimited numbers of virgin sites on a single metropolitan location" (83); tall buildings as laboratory islands and entire own world, i.e. Waldorf Astoria; Harvey Wiley Corbett and his plan for an ultra-ultra dense Manhattan; "the hotel" as a plot in itself - providing world of change encounters); "How Perfect Can Perfect Be: The Creation of Rockefeller Center" (yet another island; Roxy Theatre as producing "synthetic sunrise" (which Koolhaas loves); all as "anti-authentic;" Rockettes as a new breed of pure abstraction); "Europeans: Biuer! Dali and Le Corbusier Conquer NY" (Salvador Dali's "paranoid critical method; Corbu's attempt to pretend NY doesn't really exist so he can "create" his radiant city; Koolhaas hates Corbu as his plans drain NY of its lifeblood and congestion). This book is basically a tribute to the crazy chaos of New York.

Interesting Specifics:

Dreamland was designed as a place "to appeal to all classes" (45). 1911 = Dreamland burns down.

At this time, Modernism was all about an absence of color, and Dreamland was all white (46).

The Waldorf-Astoria was an attempt at the greatest hotel of all time - massive and all-encompassing (145). It was the focus of many 1930s Hollywood films - hotel is a plot, a world presenting myriad opportunities for random encounters at any time (148-50).

In reference to the Rockettes, I think: "Beyond sex, strictly through the effects of architecture, the virgins reproduce themselves" (217).

Interacts With:

This is a great contrast to Nature's Metropolis as Koolhaas views the city as totally unnatural and never even ventures that it could be related to nature at all.
Amusing the Million
I guess it's kind of a positive postmodernism is cool thing? Though don't know if you could really call NY urbanism "postmodern." I should maybe check again to see how "pomo" positive this guy really is - or even how pro-NYC he is. It's kind of a passionate, stream-of-consciousness kinda thing. Fun!

Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World

Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (1995)
By The Project on Disney

Synopsis: This book seeks to interrogate pleasure and to analyze the Disney World phenomenon, and is a collaboration between four different academics who all give their take on separate Disney-World-related topics, including nostalgia, heteronormativity, simulacra, etc. There is not necessarily one overarching argument, but instead many, including the idea that our culture "condemns carnival: the bawdy and rude revel of the appetites and its consequent waste and dissipation" (3). Disney World arises as the anti-carnival (though the huge heads of its characters are a form of the grotesque - but kind of the baby grotesque). Though the book is highly critical of Disney, threads of utopianism run throughout the book, especially as utopian impulses are often embedded within consumer products, and the way various views of the future are seen as new beginnings and perhaps calls for radical change. Disney World really is all about consumption, and channels our desire for a utopian sense of community into mere consumerism. Disney World also is completely about heteronormativity and the exaltation of the family. All of the fun there is highly contained and structured, and there is no sense of spontaneity or of subversiveness (hence the "anti-carnival" thing). The pleasure of D.W. is thus, "identifying with a dominant ideology and the role it assigns us" (74). Disneyfication is "the application of simplified aesthetic, intellectual, or moral standards to a thing that has the potential for more complex and though-provoking expression" (103). Hmm, that's sad. Basically, book is saying that people today have limited options.

Interesting Specifics:

Antimodernist and utopian impulses are at cross purposes (224).

Says our culture clearly "condemns carnival: the bawdy and rude revel of the appetites and its consequent waste and dissipation" (3).

Says maybe obesity is partly an "active resistance to a perceived bourgeois norm" (3). [This is an interesting line of thought - that eating fast food and getting fat could be seen as an active move of rebellion. Also creepy though, because could you then say that our craving for revelry has been channeled into a love of fast food? How pointless and non-cathartic.].

Kids love to stay in motels and hotels - Great chapter!! Says that staying in a motel is exciting for kids because it represents independence and "an unconscious social yearning for security and community" (8). Also good because it takes them away from normal school day, which is really an "indoctrination" into the "adult" work world.

"Embedded in the notion that tomorrow initiates a new beginning is a utopian desire for radical change" (39).

Tourism represents a "quest for experience" (45).

One author seeks to discover "how the pleasure we feel at Walt Disney World is negotiated through an ongoing process of identification with and - at least in part, one hopes - evasion of the ideal subject constructed by Disney's tireless 'Imagineers'" (57).

Whereas t.o.c Coney Island was full of subversive games like smashing up fake fancy china and crystal, Disney World "rather than providing opportunities to violate social proprieties, everything in the park is designed to confirm them and make doing so fun" (61). DW keeps people isolated, while Coney Island was all about jostling and mixing it up.

"Human adults do not exist in Disney World except as parents" (69). [Is this just encouraging childhood solipsism?]

The pleasure of DW is "identifying with a dominant ideology and the role it assigns us" (74).

"All expressions of mass culture include contradictory utopian impulses, which may be buried or depicted in distorted form, but nevertheless generate much of the satisfaction of mass cultural commodities (whether the consumer recognizes them as utopian or not)" (190).

Has a cool chapter on the design of DW hotels.

Interacts With:

Goss article, "The World in a Shopping Mall" (I think that's the title - idea that "stuff" kind of represents utopian longings - though Goss article is way more positive)

Foucault (in belief that all mass culture phenomena contain elements of utopianism)

Was it Barthes or Hall who talked about the two different kinds of pleasure - the pleasure of following social conventions and the pleasure of dodging them? Whoever it was, this book kind of relates to that idea - the D.W. is all about pleasure of following conventions. That's actually kind of an interesting concept - I wonder which style ultimately gives more pleasure - following or subverting the norm? Prob subverting, but you never now. Do you get some kind of group/communal feeling out of following it? Or is that group too massive to result in a group feeling??
Amusing the Million (contrast between t.o.c. carnivals and Disney-esque stuff today)

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future (1984)
By Joseph J. Corn and Brian Horrigan

Synopsis: This book examines past American visions of the future in order to show how those visions shed light on the values of their times; sees future visions as cultural artifacts. This is a coffee-table type book that sprang from a Smithsonian exhibit, and includes chapters on 1) Finding the Future (beginning with late 19th century - explores science fiction and utopian fiction, pulp magazines, futurism as linked to commodities, the rise of sci-fi tv and film); 2) The Community of Tomorrow (Progressive vision, "white city," City Beautiful, Garden City, 1939 World's Fair, FLW, Greenbelt Cities, Buckminster Fuller[city of the future as requiring blank slate]); 3) The Home of Tomorrow (rise of apartment homes yet obsession with futuristic single family homes, the rising appeal of mass-produced housing, streamlined style, high-tech kitchens); 4) Transportation of Tomorrow (rise of transportation innovation from 1880-1905, cars and planes, hopes and fears of nuclear power); 5) Weapons and Warfare of Tomorrow (WWI = weapons and electricity, 1920-30s = airplanes and war, WWII = massively destructive potential of weaponry). Authors argue that the future in the U.S. has increasingly moved from communitarian/spiritual utopias of the early days, to a "secular city of the capitalist future" in which most of the emphasis fell on the look of the future rather than the social plan. Argues also that American have long held a strong belief in "technological utopianism" - that "material means can ameliorate social problems and even perfect society" (xii). "The belief that machines, not politics, produce beneficial social change diverts people from initiating reforms that would truly distinguish the future from the present or the past" (xiii).

Interesting Specifics:

Utopian fiction was hugely popular in U.S. from 1880-90s.

We generally look at the future in terms of commodities (11).

1929 = Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House.

1938 = Orson Wells' War of the Worlds radio show.

1952 = First Hydrogen Bomb

1957 = First nuclear power plant in the U.S.; Shippingport, PA.

Interacts With:

Maybe other books about World's Fairs or different vision of the future.
David Wojcik
Rem Koolhaas (for the different proposals for future cities).

"Once-Upon-A-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America"

"Once-Upon-A-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America" (March 1999)
By Jon Goss (from Annals)

Synopsis: Argues that the Mall of America "narrates out collective loss of a natural world of innocence and immanence, and promises restoration in a utopian community of consumption" (45). In fact a sense of loss and longing seems to subconsciously drive a lot of the fantasies found there. Goss spent ten days doing "semiotic reading and participant observation" at the Mall of America, mostly reading the mall as a text. Consumption depends on a faith that the objects possess some kind of power which will then be transfered to the purchaser - i.e. sexual desirability, prestige, status, etc - and this falls in line with the anthro concept of magic systems (56). He finds that the main tropes within the mall are: movement and mobility, memory and magic, nature, primitives, enchantment, and heritage. Says "the commodity is not a souvenir of the real experience of a past or distant reality, but a memento of the retail experience in which its possibility is imagined" (70). "The task is to recognize how the age-old fears of obsolescence - nature dies, children grow up, primitives are 'civilized,' and out heritage is lost - and dreams of immanence, live in the commodity aesthetic, not to eliminate them as so much 'false consciousness,' but to liberate them and live them more fully in really meaningful consumption" (72).

Interesting Specifics:

This article has a great bibliography.

This is one of my favorites - I love it!

Says the contemporary malls are what Foucault calls " 'heterotopias of compensation,' real and discrete 'counter-sites' where multiple images of ideal times and places combine to create an illusion of a world standing outside of everyday life" (45).

Shopping malls are examples of "hypernarrated spaces (Boyer, 1994), providing texts and contents for commemoration through which are narrated the loss and restoration of a thematic meaning" (47). It attempts to unite "individual biography with natural and cultural history" via the commodity (47). [This reminds me of the Buffalo Bill book on Janet's list - that BBWWS was combining personal and historical memory through the experience of the consumer spectacle].

Interacts With:

Jennifer Price (Flight Maps)
Walter Benjamin
Bakhtin's concept of the chronotype - "generic spaciotemporal structures where stories take place" (50)
In its view of objects as things imbided with meaning and embodying a sense of loss, this fits with most of the material culture books on Jeff's list, like The Meaning of Things, and On Longing, etc. Basically anything that looks at objects as having a special almost talisman-esque power that is passed on to its owner/possessor/giver.
This book does not engage with various debates over the artificiality of the mall or consumer culture, or with the hollow shallowness of consumer culture in general. Rather, it is asking us to look deeper into the meaning behind the objects and what kind of need they must represent.
Doesn't like the high culture critique of authentic vs. inauthentic experiences, and feel discussion of that (i.e. consumption as inauthentic) just reproduces the dichotomy what consumption revolves around (49).