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Archive for January 18th, 2010

Aesthetic Interchange

Is it art (left) or compliant signage (right)?

Reader Rich (sig?)-alerted me to this dispatch from Alissa Walker about an incredible piece of guerrilla wayfinding on the freeways of Los Angeles by artist Richard Ankrom, which lasted for the better part of a decade.

The curious denouement to the story is that the carefully pre-aged sign was taken down by CALTRANS, and then replaced with a “real” version. Ankrom was unable to locate his original, which has been turned into scrap metal destined for China.

Somehow this put me in mind of a recent line from Arthur Danto’s book on Andy Warhol, vis a vis the famous Brillo Boxes: “The challenge was to explain why Warhol’s box was art while its look-alike in common life was not.” (Danto thinks you cannot, hence pop art’s disruptive presence in the continuum of art history).

Perhaps it’s time for CALTRANS to institute an artist-in-residence program.

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Posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 2:06 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
3 Comments. Click here to leave a comment.

Consider the Yugo

My latest Slate column, a look at Jason Vuic’s new book about the Yugo, is up.

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Posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 10:51 am by: Tom Vanderbilt
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As If Traffic In Moscow Wasn’t Bad Enough

Via the Moscow Times:

An enormous television screen showing a pornographic film caused a midnight traffic jam along Moscow’s Garden Ring Road as stunned motorists slammed on the brakes to gawk at the writhing naked bodies.

The owner of the 9-by-6-meter advertising screen said hackers had broken into the screen’s computer system and turned on the porn. “They were either acting out of hooliganism or were from a rival company,” Viktor Laptev, commercial director of advertising firm Panno.ru, told RIA-Novosti.

Authorities said they are investigating the incident, which lasted about 20 minutes. “Within three minutes we found it out, and within 15 minutes the screen was shut off,” said the deputy head of Moscow’s advertising committee, Alexander Menchuk, Interfax reported.

I can’t help be reminded of one of James Howard Kunstler’s favorite words: Clusterfuck.

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Posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 9:10 am by: Tom Vanderbilt
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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Kate Runde at Vintage: krunde@randomhouse.com.

For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

For speaking engagement inquiries, please contact
Jenna Meulemans at the Knopf Speaker Bureau.

Order Traffic from:

Amazon | B&N | Borders
Random House | Powell’s

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U.S. Paperback UK Paperback
Traffic UK
Drive-on-the-left types can order the book from Amazon.co.uk.

For UK publicity enquiries please contact Rosie Glaisher at Penguin.

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