The Abandoned City

Earlier this morning I was leafing thru reviews of The Warriors and it dovetailed nicely with a thread I’ve been poring over at the ever fantastic Skyscraper City, a forum dedicated to all things urban and architectural. The pictures below are taken from a thread entitled Brutal New York, a lively discussion about New York's more insalubrious neighborhoods of the 70's and 80's. I've always been drawn to abandoned spaces and forbidden zones - I remember well seeing the first teaser trailers for I Am Legend and getting excited by shots of Times Square chocked with marauding plant life and streets strewn with car wreckage. I think Omega Man would have greatly benefited from these broke down NYC locations – despite scenes with Charlton Heston driving around an impressively empty Los Angeles, the film still looks a little too antiseptic for my liking. Leave it to the Italians to take advantage of NYC's ready-made apocalypse, and I'm particularly fond of 1982's Bronx Warriors in this regard, which features some very dilapidated neighborhoods… Some interesting links to follow for your reading pleasure. Should you be looking for a musical accompaniment I would highly recommend the title track from Harold Budd’s dark and ominous 1984 masterpiece Abandoned Cities...

Brutal New York
NYC in the 70’s
NYC filming locations for The Warriors

Sutro Gothic

More improbable buildings... below, the Cliff House, San Francisco and the Medina Castle in Pit and the Pendulum... This morning I came across a photograph of Adolph Sutro’s Gothic palace Cliff House, from 1902. A structure still exists today on the cliffs above above Ocean Beach but it's not quite as enchanting. Looking at the photograph jogged a memory of Albert Whitlock's beautiful matte painting seen in Corman's film. I haven't heard Roger Corman, or Tim Lucas' commentary tracks from Arrow's BR of Pit and the Pendulum, but I wonder was the Cliff House an influence on Whitlock's design ?

Philips Pavilion

Pictured below, the Philips Pavilion designed by architect and composer Iannis Xenakis for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels… I watched Aliens a few w/ends back and have been mulling over the image in James Cameron’s film of the dome-shaped atmosphere processing station on LV-426. I expect Cameron based his sketches for the plant on an industrial installation of some sort but this imposing looking structure has always reminded me of Xenakis’ complex, curving 3-pronged tent design of the Philips Pavilion. With that in mind I’m currently listening to Xenakis’ 1971 work Persepolis, an hour-long electro-acoustic sound work of metallic drones, industrial clatter, atonal whistles and serrated electronics. The work was written to commemorate the founding of the Persian city of Persepolis with Xenakis’ swirling score representing busy city life, but rather it sounds like a trip into some infernal slaughterhouse, all swinging meat hooks and rusted chains. Another pivotal proto-Industrial piece of music. Listen here