Ballardian

BLDGBLOG has a nice piece on painter Angelina Gualdoni’s beautiful oils of an abandoned shopping mall in Chicagoland.
“Terrain Vague”

An essay in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine suggests that the recent troubles in Paris were High-Rise meets Super-Cannes — anger and aggression inculcated by architecture. But you already knew that.
Revolting High Rises (registration required)
‘The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, as Francophobes have been more than ready to explain, bears some of the blame [...]

Bruce Sterling is a prolific science-fiction writer, futurist, social critic and design professor, best known for his bestselling novels and seminal short fiction, and as the editor of the Mirrorshades anthology that defined the ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre. His nonfiction includes works of futurism such as Tomorrow Now; a regular column and blog for Wired; and his [...]

This one has it all — submerged flyovers, apartment dwellers fighting their way to the top floors, oil tankers deposited miles inland like drowned giants, refugee colonies in the 1970s sports arena, urban citizens reduced to Hobbesian looters overnight — too bad it’s nonfiction.

The New York Times recently reported on the phenomenon of Los Angeles paparazzi inventing their own photo ops by crashing their cars into those of their celebrity targets.
“Ms. [Cameron] Diaz recalled walking in the street with Mr. [Justin] Timberlake and a friend and his dog about two years ago, when a photographer in a Toyota [...]