JAMES LILEKS ON FANTASIA AND GOOGIE* GAS STATION ARCHITECTURE:
Always loved that movie. They re-released the soundtrack coincident with its reappearance, and I remember reading the liner notes about how it was doomed by the evaporation of European markets. It came out in 1939. That year had a great fascination – the World’s Fair, Fantasia, everything seemingly modern and striving, recognizable but back in the Hat and Skirts era, everyone going about their business unaware of the edge of the abyss.
I don’t think this is the same, but there are years in which bright lines are drawn, and the lines flame and burn in a way that makes people want to avert their eyes from what came before. The events that concerned people in 2019 will be of little consequence going forward, and while this is all an expected development in the spasmodic, reactive way cultures adapt and then form a narrative later that attempts to make a continuous story, I have the feeling that much of what made up the landscape of the past will be forgotten with impatience amid stern new modes of thought.
That was a gas station, and there’s a reason it looked like that.
Uh huh. Who cares?
Well, it’s important.
Why?
I suppose it isn’t. But it was.
Read the whole thing.
And speaking of “events that concerned people in 2019 [that] will be of little consequence going forward,” here’s Kevin Williamson writing, “Goodbye, Green New Deal:”
If Americans are this resistant to paying a large economic price to enable measures meant to prevent a public-health catastrophe in the here and now — one that threatens the lives of people they know and love — then how much less likely are they to bear not weeks or months but decades of disruption and economic dislocation and a permanently diminished standard of living in order to prevent possibly severe consequences to people in Bangladesh or Indonesia 80 or 100 years from now?
Also well worth a read in its entirety.