The sets of some TV shows are Potemkin villages, just realistic enough to pass muster with the cameras on one side. Others are incredibly detailed simulacra: the most impressive ever, for my money, was the sprawling installation at Cinnecitta Studios for the HBO show Rome (more on which some other time soon).
When I visited the […]
posted 3 November 2008 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet
Sometime around 1999, possibly suffering from a case of pre-millennium tension, I got fascinated by futurism. I ended up collecting lots of examples of predictions that were supposed to have flowered by 2000, from cyborgs to vitamin-fortified alcohol to gunfights between astronauts in outer space. You can read the resulting article here; it starts with […]
posted 8 September 2008 in Archives, Articles, Unpublished. 2 comments
About ten years ago, Wired had a regular feature where they did “interviews” with dead people. They kicked it off with a cover story on Marshall McLuhan; it turned out that skillful excerpts from the works of sufficiently interesting thinkers of the past could create the illusion of a modern conversation. I stumbled on a […]
posted 16 June 2008 in Archives, Articles, Unpublished. no comments yet