If you need some background on the Tasaday (controversy) for the p13-23 Simulations reading this is good. The YouTube description by rghwd46gf sums it up quite well.
Last term we watched Kustom Kar Kommandos, Anger's short that featured Hot Rod culture. Here's another by Anger, again think about the possible circumstances of making the film, and what may be unsettling about it, or maybe it just seems corny!
Okay, get the whole scoop on this one from a quite elderly Kenneth Anger...
RPPC is an acronym for real photo post card, referencing a post card made in a photographic darkroom. These were somewhat faddish from the turn of the 20th century until WWI, although many were still made up into the 1970s. They often include text done with lettering paint on the actual negative or with some sort of overlay. You can image search many subjects along with RPPC and see consistently porportioned images mostly from the earlier 1900s. Although Route 66 was opened in 1926, well after the time of most RPPCs, searching on route 66 gas station RPPC does yield many images...
All of these images were made to promote these businesses, all likely no longer operating. They are taken by different photographers, but adhere to the same compositional formula.
What exactly is being promoted here, as we move beyond the original purpose of the post cards and think of these images in the grander scheme of things? How do they factor into the contemplation of certain American obsessions? What do they tell us now, and what questions are they asking us?
In 1963, in the midst of Pop Art, Ed Ruscha decided to publish a book of his photographs of Route 66 gasoline stations, taken as he drove between LA to his boyhood home of Oklahoma City, something he did five times a year. Although they emulate the deadpan post card view somewhat there is much more variation in these compositions.
The first edition was numbered and occasionally signed, which Ruscha later admitted was a "mistake".
The idea of the replica can be seen in our earliest cultural artifacts. But when did the simulation become our only reality, when did the real cease to exist? When did we begin to live entirely in simulation? Some see the fictions of Borges an important cultural moment.
This short piece was written in 1946, but the theme emerged in Borges writings in the 1930s. Then in 1955 we have Disneyland, an actual place based on fictional places.
For me, this is the best vehicle toward understanding the influx of new technology into pop music existent. Paul Morley argues here that Kraftwerk were/are more influential than the Beatles. Seemingly an outrageous statement, this doc makes that claim seem viable.