They're redoing "The Bad Seed," except it's a mini-series. If you haven't seen the original, it's pretty good, and I'm sure there's lots of analysis about how it was a subversive critique of the family archetypes of the day. Actually, that's not the subtext. That's the text. The little girl is so loathsome you can't imagine why anyone else didn't see through her. The audience comes to hate her so much it's not enough that she is punished by God with electrocution. The end credits give the audience what they really wanted.
ARCHITORTURE Many architects aren't looking to the temptations of computer-aided design to invent new bad buildings; the ones with a sense of history are looking to the 70s for bad buildings. This article, which lauds three New York proposals, gets all a-quiver over this beaut:
If there's anything we learned from the 70s, it's how enormous, featureless concrete bases has the same effect on streetlife as molten aluminum poured into an ant colony. In related news: a Brutalist landmark may be renovated, despite the objections of people who prize the style. It's the Orange County Government Center in Goshen, NY. It looks like a group of disconnected, cluttered, overstuffed bureaucratic offices, jammed together with no thought of efficiency, just a collection of individual fiefdoms radiating petty power. Wikipedia:
Eighty-seven roofs.
Slightly related: here's James Ellroy's house. Interesting furniture. Ghastly bathroom. Note the absence of a computer; he writes on long pads of paper in pencil.
SADBOTS Art made by computers is creepy, as discussed last week. Conversations between chatbots have a certain melancholy poetry, punctuated with dada wit.
