This is the start of a new series, collection of the most inspiring & hard-to-find retro-futuristic graphics. We will try to stay away from the well-known American pulp & book cover illustrations and instead will focus on the artwork from rather unlikely sources: Soviet & Eastern Bloc "popular tech & science" magazines, German, Italian, British fantastic illustrations and promotional literature - all from the Golden Age of Retro-Future (from 1930s to 1970s). Click to enlarge most images.

Rare & Beautiful Vintage Visions of the Future

Johnathan Yardley reviews Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's.

Here's an excerpt from the book:

"A time of revolution ... is an uneasy time to live in. It is easier to tear down a code than to put a new one in its place, and meanwhile there is bound to be more or less wear and tear and general unpleasantness. People who have been brought up to think that it is sinful for women to smoke or drink, and scandalous for sex to be discussed across the luncheon table, and unthinkable for a young girl to countenance strictly dishonorable attentions from a man, cannot all at once forget the admonitions of their childhood. It takes longer to hard-boil a man or a woman than an egg."

A History That Stands The Test of Time

In the campus turmoil of 40 years ago, few would have anticipated the current "saturation of higher education with market thinking." His basic complaint was this: Campuses are no longer centers of rebellion. To which a junior at Yale responded:

"How do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution? How do we rebel against parents who sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don't. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the Internet."

Meanwhile, politics plods on as though nothing has happened.

A Slow-Motion Revolution

If you are planning (you should) to go see Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary "Manufactured landscapes", which opened last week in theaters across the US after spending a year mesmerizing film festivals audiences and will soon arrive in Europe, make sure you get there in time, for nothing describes the scale and essence of today's globalized industry more tellingly than the opening scene: a seven-minutes tracking shot of the floor of a boundless Chinese factory, row after row after row of disciplined workers and efficient repetition that Stanley Kubrick could have filmed.

Regarding the repetition, in one scene which observes the manual assembly of circuit breakers, I thought of Michael Haneke and the ping-pong scene from 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. (In the film, this scene runs for around seven minutes.) The opening scene of "Landscapes" brought to mind Jean-Luc Godard's Tout Va Bien, especially the closing scene, consisting of a long tracking shot along the innumerable aisles of check-out counters in a supermarket.

The film is now available on DVD. Amazon says:

Manufactured Landscapes works triple-time as a documentary portrait, a tone poem, and a work of protest.

Ed Burtynsky's beautifully monstrous 'Manufactured landscapes'

... gorgeous ... mesmerizing ... important, disquieting ... absorbing, if unsettling ...

Make time to see this film. (Don't forget about Iraq in Fragments.)

Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Jennifer Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.

Wired offers photographs, along with an interview with the photographer Ed Burtynsky:

"I started to think: where is all this natural material going, where does it get formed into the products that we buy?"

Manufactured Landscapes

Here is former national security adviser Anthony "6 Nightmares" Lake:

I would not attribute absolute altruism to the West or deny that Chinese development projects have done some real good in Africa and for Africans.

What all of this says is that the creation of a more civilized world order is a long term project, and that the way to deal with the Chinese is not by hyperventilation but by pursuing efforts to help them see the advantage of integration into a mutually beneficial system, and, at the same time, cooperating with them when we have common interests while competing vigorously in areas where our interests diverge—for example, in access to energy resources.

I do believe there will be progress. The pressure brought on them by people like Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg over the Olympics apparently led to their doing more (if not enough) over Darfur. This shows that when it can be couched in terms of their interests, the Chinese can be brought into a more positive role on such issues.

Brangelina vs. Chinese Mercantilism in Africa

Here is Andy Xie, an MIT-trained engineer/economist, and a former star analyst at Morgan Stanley:

“The hot money is going to come to China. Six months ago, I wrote an article that said as the U.S. comes down, a lot of people will come to China. The reason why is because I see the financial guys are running the world, so-called financial capitalists. … These people need to do something. When one bubble bursts, they go somewhere else. You can be sure of that. . . . Next year, the hot money story is going to become bigger. …

“Yes, we see a lot of problems in China. But the trade is still intact. The bubble can continue with all this hot money coming in. So the strong economy is likely to last.”

(Until recently, Xie was very pessimistic.)

China Rises

The theme-park industry has two tiers. The really big money is in what insiders call “destination” parks. These are so fancy and expensive that people fly thousands of miles to visit them. Asian governments invite Disney and Universal Studios to build ever-bigger parks on their territory in the hope that this will spark a tourist boom, which it usually does. Because they aim for a global audience, Hollywood theme parks tend to be spectacular but self-consciously inoffensive to all nationalities. To learn about the real America, you have to look at its smaller theme parks—the ones only Americans visit.

People do not fly to Dollywood; they drive there in big cars full of squabbling children. East-coast accents, let alone foreign ones, are rare. The park is thus an excellent window on what people in this part of the American heartland like.

Dollywood values

A semistructured approach can generate great ideas even in familiar settings -- and works better than unfettered brainstorming or strict quantitative analysis.

Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box

Moving books onto the network and the ramifications for how we define reading, and our privacy.

Reading the Next Book