The Dickbutt is Strong in This One

i cannot stop laughing at send no pee

it’s rot girl autumn! we're decaying alongside the trees!

Rip to the queen but I can't stop having a fat ass

Every time I'm having a bad day I come back to these posts I have a feeling they get funnier every time I see them

my family has spoken of this movie wistfully for decades. we saw it, once, perhaps, in an earlier age, and remembered it—not for its plot, passable enough, nor for its remarkable CG achievements (first completely digital protagonist), not for the hapless charm of Bill Pullman. no, we are a family of Building Appreciators. we wanted to look at that *house* again.

and now we have.

a service I have access to finally re-acquired the rights, probably seasonally, to stream the 1995 Casper movie, and I have avidly re-watched it with my mother for architectural reasons.

ye gods, the sets. the sets. I need to speak to the art director and the production design team and the set dressers like. how were the decisions made. cause I need to analyze this house. I couldn't tell if it was sets or a Location for the longest time, because they really heckin' Committed, but the consensus (and my architect uncle joined the council after some time as well) ended up at yes, it's a set, but they looked at the Gaudi apartments in Barcelona and the doors in Prague and the Vienna metro stations because we recognize those curves and proportions.

I suspect I am going to spend awhile Appreciating this thing now that I have acquired it again, but for now, just revel in the Grand Pan of Foyer Reveal.

before I have to go to work, I’ll start with just the exterior. the first clear shot is purposefully obscured with windy rain, but you can see the backlit translucence of the second nested segmented arch silhouetting the ostensible wrought-iron curves between the bigger concrete- or wood-looking separators, the gorgeous pendant lamps tilting in the tempest, and the Park Güell style curves on the handrails. I’m perishing about the kidney-bean lacunae in the porch rail, but that is one of the only departures on the entire front exterior from perfect grace, really, so I’ll take them.

we get a clearer, more expansive introductory shot of the exterior when the family switches the breaker and turns the lights on:

the detailing on the door is clearer here, and the outwelling of the porch at the entry makes more logistical sense in contrast to the curve of the rest of the house. I suspect that bare wood beam/truss support in the ceiling of the porch wasn’t meant to be so pointedly illuminated, since the rest of the exterior here is dressed to look like cast concrete, but its orthogonal sensibility doesn’t detract too much from the rest of the lines here.

the next split-second shots of the exterior when the rest of the lights are turned on are, of course, suspect. they didn’t build that nonsense, no matter how lumpy they made it in halfhearted imitation of the Casa Milà.

the matte painting we get later agrees; they tried to make a turret situation work, and the proportions of the lumps don’t work out to support them; instead, the whole thing is trapped on the awkward slide between fungal and phallic. not that I don’t dig a beautiful mushroom house! but I don’t think it’s what they were going for.

on the other hand, before they turned the lights on, we got a few stable shots of the entry. these kids are framed right in the nested arches that have nested ceilings, and the lines really work, even the column capitals interrupted echoing the slight keyhole on the door arch.

a slightly different angle on the front door shows that the random-seeming little curlicues off the ends of the arch supports are echoed by some of the moulding on the wall, as well as on the arch supports themselves. it brings the room together, considering the vast and many-turned spiral on the floor. once we get there.

now, when we get a full view of the foyer from the door... that’s nuts. they really did that. they built that whole place, including the Stargate Atlantis ZPM-ass mosaic chandelier you can’t even see most of in this shot due to the arch over the entry.

before we leave the foyer I just want to emphasize one more thing: 

so this is a broom closet in-fiction but. the tiny mosaic tile floor is laid (not well, but interestingly) in swirly non-orthogonal patterns and i just thought that should be acknowledged before we leave this particular hallway:

we never get a great still shot of the bedroom, partially because I think it's small enough that you can't fit most of the elements of interest in one frame, but. even with this fuzzy motionblur you can't tell me that this isn't modeled on Casa Batlló. The angle between the column and the little oval window and the curve of the bigger one.

it's very difficult to get an architecturally-focused, rather than plot-focused, shot of the kitchen, but it deserves to be seen.

So,,,,,,,,,,,, the library.

this place sucks I’m going home

Details of a golden sea, part II : Sunset at sea, by Diyarbakirli Tahsin (1875–1937)

Took a wrong turn somewhere

i took a nap and woke up in all these goddam spinanch

Soft boys ~

'Night Flight'. Minyoung Kim. 2021.

desperately craving weird surrealist arthurania. Knights with no faces wandering through the mists. Seams between Christian and pre-Christian Britain gaping like open wounds. Beafts and visions. Maybe a monk. Maybe the monk is gay

'Landscape with a Sunlit Stream'. Charles Francois Daubigny. c. 1877.