Monday 5 December 2011

The Geography of Nowhere

The blog has had to take a bit of a back seat these last 2 weeks as Vanessa had to travel back home for personal reasons.

New Mexico

While I was in New York, I was having a conversation with the photographer John Trotter about my first impressions of the US. He recommended I read the book, The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler. The opening page in this book sums up our feelings fairly well.

" Eighty percent of everything built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading- the jive plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotels complexes, the "gourmet mansardic" junk food joints, the Orwellian office parks, featuring
buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chaingang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic. agroaphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call "Growth".
Arizona


New Mexico         






Arizona
Colorado
New Mexico




New Mexico
Texas
Arizona

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for these George. I especially like Colorado and Arizona.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What territory did England claim at the time of the Lousiana Purchase? And, also, what territory was in dispute between the United States and England at the time of the Louisiana Purchase?

    ReplyDelete