And While Worshipping The Police.

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Yet all fits with what the interior design tries to hide, namely how unerringly peculiar the house is, yet it is not entirely able to do so because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

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holy shit

Tired: you know Roman Roy is a trans guy because he's short

Wired: You know Roman Roy is a trans guy because he's into necrophilia

Honestly? The B-52's are basically if Talking Heads was ABBA, except from Georgia

ich liebe dich du schönes rind

dein haar ist blau wie nasser wind

dein herz ist hart wie kleisterstein

in tausend tagen bist du mein

hü, hottehü

ich schlaf von spät bis früh

die liebe macht mich krank

vielen dank

- Ritter Rost, Gedicht des Bauchredners

He has an excellent point.

They are going to shut down this app

i think ptolomaea by ethel cain is one of the most brilliantly crafted songs i’ve ever listened to.

the way it opens with this distorted deeper voice (isaiah) and you hear the sound of flies buzzing in the background underneath the voice, thats such a cool detail. and while isaiah is singing, you hear ethel incoherently mumble (you literally hear her say “mama?” its so 😭😭) as she’s waking up from the drugs. when we finally hear her voice, it’s high pitched, raw, and vulnerable. because of how vulnerable of a situation she is in, but she doesn’t realize it yet because of the drugs she’s on. so this whole beginning is echoey and it captures the whole aloneness she’s feeling.

and then we get a beat drop at “even the iron still fears the rot,” where the instrumentals are a little heavier, her voice is still high and raw but there’s a sense of knowing in it. (“hiding from something, i cannot stop. walking on shadows, i cant lead him back”) as her hallucinations and the drugs start to wear off, she’s facing this darkness that’s been eating away at her with “daddy’s left and mama won’t come home,” which is something she rarely comes to terms with.

then we get that dark distorted voice again saying “you poor thing, sweet morning lamb. there’s nothing you can do, it’s already been done,” which is incredibly terrifying. not to mention that deafening crash of the drums, god the way those drums thunder so intensely like you can feel the dread in your bones. and then we hear ethel’s voice again saying “what fear a man like you brings upon a woman like me? please dont look at me..” which refers to when isaiah tells her to “show me your face,” during that line. and she’s pleading for him to stop looking at him, you can’t hear it because it’s in the background but he says “come here,” and right after you hear ethel say “i can see it in your eyes, tell me, what have you done?” which then goes into a sea of begs and pleas for him to “stop, stop” until the final “stop” is not sung, but instead a bone chilling shrill shriek. which is cut off by “i am the face of love’s rage.” and if you listen to the acapella, during “i am the face of love’s rage,” right underneath that main vocal, you hear a second high pitched scream, you hear bundles “no’s” and even a “no! please!” which i think ties the story really well together.

in the acapella, while “blessed be the daughters of cain,” is being read out, you can hear the gargling and choking noises as ethel is struggling to breathe and as she’s literally dying its really sickening but so well executed from an artist perspective. and then at the very very end, you hear a death rattle like that is INSANE

i love ptolomaea, i love how the instrumentals create such a unique atmosphere that makes it as terrifying as it sounds and how hayden uses her voice in different ways to tell the story effectively. and it works, it all works.

ptolomaea is the best song on preacher’s daughter thank you for coming to my ted talk